Thanking her for opening my eyes

In 1968, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott decided to teach her third-graders a lesson about racism. For an entire day, she conducted her class as if the brown-eyed children were superior to those with blue eyes. In this 1970 photo, the "inferior" students are at the back of the line wearing collars.

An Iowa teacher's 1960s classroom experiment on race changed my life. Now here I was, knocking on her door.

By Corina Knoll
LA Times
March 26, 2009

Jane Elliott has blue eyes.

The years have turned her once-brown hair a bright snowy white, and at 75 years old she's rounder, maybe shorter, than she used to be. But eye color doesn't change.

Elliott, an Iowa teacher, made deliberate use of that in 1968 when she created a now-famous exercise for her classroom of white third-graders. It was the day after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and she was struggling to explain the concept of racism.

She hit upon an idea: For an entire day, she conducted her class as if the brown-eyed children were superior to those with blue eyes. Elliott eventually made headlines, appeared on "The Tonight Show" and became the subject of multiple documentaries.

Three decades later, my high school sociology teacher played us snippets of a news program about the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise. For a 16-year-old Korean adoptee growing up in Iowa, the most fascinating aspect was this: Elliott had made history in Riceville, two hours from my hometown.

The daughter of white parents, I grew up in a predominantly white city, attended an overwhelmingly white school and interacted mostly with white friends. The subject of race in my community was hidden, buried under rhetoric that insisted we remain "colorblind."

(More here.)