Blue Eyes / Brown Eyes and Racism

“Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” and Racism
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“Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” and Racism
A day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., April 5, 1968, Jane Elliot conducted a bold “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise on third graders of Riceville, Iowa, which later became a landmark of social science (Anthony, 2009). While McGraw-Hill, a textbook publishing company, has listed Elliot on a timeline of renowned educators alongside Aristotle, Confucius, Plato, Maria Montessori, Booker T. Washington, Horace Mann and 23 other great teachers in history, Elliot’s exercise continues to stir a heated controversy (Bloom, 2005). Elliot separated the classroom into brown-eyed and the blue-eyed groups, and the blue-eyed students were considered better and smarter compared to their counterparts. Brown-eyed students had their lunch last, never allowed second helpings, used paper cups instead of drinking from the fountain, had five minutes less of recess, and sat at the back of the classroom (Anthony, 2009). The brown-eyed students could not mix with others on the playground throughout the day, as they were inferior to the blue-eyed students. This impartial treatment made blue-eyed students, who were slower in class to score better grades and become confident leaders. Upon reversing the roles by convincing the brown-eyed group was more intelligent due to melanin that makes their eyes appear brown, the brown-eyed students emerged as the superior group. Although Elliot is not much admired at her own place in Iowa due to the experiment, she has transformed many at the Department of Corrections where she currently works. Besides, she has appeared in several TV shows such as the John Carson Show and Oprah Winfrey Show and given talks to over 300 universities and colleges (Anthony, 2009). The PBS Frontline documentary, A Class Divided (1985) is based on Elliot’s “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise, and the film illustrates irrationality, inhumanity, and immorality of racism in the contemporary society characterized by different forms of discrimination stemming from individual differences. Based on Jane Elliot’s controversial experiment and the theory of cultural relativism, this paper argues that human behaviors and abilities are a product of nature and nurture, the factors that make humans different from another.
Like in the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise, the environment/setting determine one’s intelligence or ingenuity in solving problems. Environmental stimuli, such as discouraging the blue-eyed students that they were not smart as the blue-eyed ones due to melanin made one of the blue-eyed student perform dismally in an arithmetic problem. The pseudoscientific claims in the 1960s experiment have repeatedly misled the perceptions about intelligence to the modern day. James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who co-discovered the double helical structure of DNA, also made controversial remarks in 2007 that Africans are less intellectual compared to whites (Wicherts, Dolan, Carlson, & van der Maas, 2010). This reprehensible and unscientific racial remark saw him being stripped of his titles and losing his job at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he had headed for many years. Less than a decade later, Rushton and Templer (2012) published a paper in the Personality and Individual Differences journal concluding that darker individuals have a relatively lower IQ than light-skinned humans. In both these observations, Watson and the 2012 paper did not consider the role of environment in shaping human ability and behaviors. Elliot discovered that the blue-eyed students performed better compared to their counterparts when the exercise was reversed. The denial of these factors is the basis of cultural relativism theory that helps explain morality is not universal, but defined depending on one’s cultural background (Park, 2014). Similar to cultural relativis...