‘I am a racist.’

Known as an activist for equality, Jane Elliott opened her presentation in the Union with these words last night.

She calls herself a racist because she was taught to be one, she said. She ‘received a racist education’ and even called the Bible ‘racist.’

Elliott was a third grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa in the late 1960s. Upon hearing that Martin Luther King, Jr, had been assassinated, she knew that she had to bring this in to her next day’s lesson.

She said that we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, so in 1968, her third grade students did not know that discrimination could occur because it was not happening to them.

After going through the normal morning rituals of saying the Pledge of Allegiance and singing ‘God Bless America,’ she and her students discussed King.

Elliott’s students wanted to know what it was like to be discriminated against, so she tried to show them.

Elliott created a discrimination exercise based on eye color.

The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise is now a textbook example of discrimination. Elliot said she chose eye color as a characteristic to split they class because height was too uniform, all were the same age, and hair color is too easily changed.

The first day, the blue-eyed students were inferior and the brown-eyed students were superior. The superior brown-eyed students confronted their blue-eyed teacher. They asked Elliot why she was allowed to be teaching, if she was inferior to them. The superior children even bullied the inferior on the playground at recess.

On the second day of her exercise, the blue-eyed students were superior. These students were not as vicious as the brown-eyed students. Elliott explained that these students did not want to treat anyone as badly as they had been treated the day before.

This resistance to getting even is still apparent in today’s society.

‘There is no guaranteed equality. We must strive for equality of opportunity and equitable treatment under the law,’ she said.

Disgusting, scary, and absolutely frightening were words used by Elliott to describe her experience with the exercise during a phone interview.

‘I felt sick to my stomach,’ she said, referring to after she saw the children’s responses to the exercise. ‘The minute they could treat their blue-eyed classmates unfairly and not receive repercussions, they became totally racist.’

Elliot shared the children’s behavior with her co-workers in the teachers’ lounge that afternoon. Elliot realized that her efforts were necessary, when a fellow teacher expressed a racist attitude.

‘I don’t know why you are doing that. I thought it was about time somebody shot that son of a bitch [MLK],’ one teacher said as Elliot recalls.

From that moment, Elliott was determined that no student would leave her classroom as ignorant at 9 years old as that teacher was at 60 years old.

Elliott explained that this exercise allows you to develop empathy for those that are different.

‘It gives you some idea how people of color are being treated by society to this day,’ she said.

This anti-racist message was deeply felt and appreciated by students who experience racism. After seeing the video of Elliot’s exercise, one student could empathize with the ‘inferior’ children’s reaction to discrimination.

‘That’s my life everyday,’ said Sharonda Glover, the co-director of the University Activities Organization event.

Other students who may not feel discriminated against, finally ‘got it’ after Elliot’s presentation.

‘I have more awareness of what racism is. It’s not only names and derogatory comments,’ said sophomore Nicole Arnold.

One of Elliott’s other examples of racism was an average world map that appears in many school classrooms. The equator is two thirds of the way down the map instead of at the center. The countries mainly populated by white peoples are larger than any other countries.

Elliot said that this country should be described as a stir fry, not as the traditional melting pot. In a stir fry, the vegetables are not put in a blender and mixed together; each element is kept distinct to maintain its diversity.

Regardless of skin color, everyone is conditioned to the myth of white superiority, Elliot said. She asked audience members to stand if they wanted to be treated like citizens of color. No one stood.

‘You know what is happening,’ she said. ‘Why are you so willing to allow it to happen?’