Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes
A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality
by Stephen G. Bloom
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Pub Date Oct 05 2021 | Archive Date Nov 15 2021
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Description
The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children the experiment’s purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on students’ eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel, self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work?
Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the first time Jane Elliott’s jagged rise to stardom. It is an unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town’s children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town White America’s reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the “Mother of Diversity Training,” who was driven against all odds to succeed.
Advance Praise
"A balanced view of both his abrasive subject and her notorious experiment. . . . A clear-eyed portrayal of a controversial woman."—Kirkus Reviews
"Stephen G. Bloom deftly narrates and analyzes a complex story. The reader is hooked from the start. I kept thinking this would make a great movie."—Kathryn Olmsted, author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism
"This book is a vital record, part of a mosaic of analysis on racial attitudes in post mid-century America and how to address racism in the era Jane Elliott was in her zenith. It's important for many reasons, but doubly more so now in the era of BLM. Bloom brings this story forward and makes it essential reading for today."—Dale Maharidge, author of Pulitzer Prize–winning And Their Children after Them
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780520382268 |
| PRICE | $27.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 312 |
