Jane Elliott is pretty well known, if not by name, then by description. She’s the Iowa teacher who, in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., divided her third grade class by eye color and tried to give them first-hand experience of the horrors of racism. She’s since further used the exercise with groups of adults, including as part of the early days of corporate diversity training.

And she’s not terribly well-liked in Riceville, Iowa, where she first used this tool and attracted world-wide attention.

That story is the one Stephen G. Bloom has decided to tell in this book, and it’s a revealing one—though probably not in the way he expected.

The majority of Bloom’s sources are the locals, and they appear united. Eliot thinks she’s better than everyone else, she’s smarter than everyone else, and everyone else is racist. In short, it’s about what you’d expect, given that she’s the local girl who grew up, got educated, came home and turned the status quo on its head.

Many of them also seem to believe that she’s made a lot of money as a diversity education consultant, which would be laughable if it weren’t so predictably provincial. She’s made a living, and why anyone would begrudge her that is beyond me.

It’s quite easy—and I know this from hard experience as an Iowan—for salt of the earth white people to insist they’re not racist at all. The truth of the matter is much more complex. Like well-meaning, centrist white people everywhere (I grew up in Oregon and also lived in Missouri, Vermont and California), though, they get damned uncomfortable when pressed on the particulars of how white supremacy and systemic racism works in this country. That’s especially true in exceptionally majority white places like Oregon, Iowa and Vermont.

I’ve never met Jane Elliott, though I have seen her in action on video and on television programs. She seems to be the sort of person who does not suffer fools gladly.

And, while Bloom quotes her extensively in this book, he didn’t interview her for it. He had one interview (that, by his own reporting, didn’t go particularly well) for a profile a number of years ago.

His main point seems to be that Elliott’s “blue eyes/brown eyes” exercise was traumatic for the children in the third grade classes and that they were too young (and the exercise—or, as he insists, the “experiment” was too poorly managed to be effective.

That it was traumatic is undoubtedly true. In fact, if the exercise of experiencing what it’s like to be oppressed on the basis of race isn’t traumatic, it’s probably not being done well at all.

But Bloom very neatly sidesteps the fact that Black children and other children of color the same age are routinely traumatized by exactly that sort of racism. While he raises issues of informed consent—and rightly so—he seems to forget that this was initiated in 1968, and doesn’t provide historical context for how much less parents expected to give (and teachers expected to need to obtain) consent for classroom lessons.

He also argues that Elliott’s confrontational manner is counterproductive even with adults.

While certainly being confronted about one’s bad behavior can cause one’s defenses to immediately hit red alert levels, we’d have to wonder, how else does he think it would be possible to get well-meaning white people to pay attention? How many times must people be told to “go slow” and “be polite” while they are, quite literally, being murdered by police and disenfranchised at every turn?

In Elliott’s presentations, she asks the assembled group if they would be willing to be treated as Black people are in this country. No one volunteers.

She then says that obviously, we all know what’s going on if we’re not willing to be treated that way. We all know that we are allowing white supremacy to flourish, and that must mean that we either agree with it or we’re cowards.

Jane Elliott is one of those prickly truth-tellers that make us uneasy. But damn it, she’s right. She’s been right all along. Asking the same white moderates that Dr. King castigated all those years ago to endure for a few hours what our fellow citizens of color live with every day does not make her a misanthrope.

It makes her an ally of the highest order.

When it comes to the white supremacy that is silently and “moderately” reinforced by the people who think she’s too extreme, may we all come down on her side. She deserves a better biography than this.

When it comes to racism, once seen, it cannot be unseen. Failure to take action means we don’t care or we’re cowards.