From the past to the present, we have seen countless situations in which people are divided within themselves. These cover a very wide area, from fields such as religion and philosophy to gender discrimination. Among these issues is the debate about the superiority of white skin color over black, which we see still continuing.
Even from the outside, one can see how inhumane racism is, but as it stands, it’s hard to know exactly what it’s like without being exposed to it. Setting off from this, Jane Elliott, who was a primary school teacher at the time, also conducted the split-class experiment to show her students how racism can produce results. Let’s look at the details together.
The experiment led to the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. assassination caused by:
Martin Luther King Jr. He advocated world-wide peace and racial equality. Since we are talking about the middle and the end of the 1900s, it is useful to know that these were the times when issues such as racism were most severe. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
The next day, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott would go to school and face questions from students. In addition, we are talking about a class where certain historical figures are worked out and one of them is declared a hero every month, the hero of the month was King himself who was assassinated.
Elliott wanted to show both how he would answer future questions about King’s death and how bad racism can be:
He went to class the next day and went to school the next day. As he had expected, he began to receive questions about King’s death. Elliott, who wanted to go beyond answering these questions and offer a more effective solution, started his experiment after that.
But the school he taught was in the state of Iowa, where there was not a large number of blacks. In other words, in order to show the effect of discrimination, it would be necessary to find another difference:
As a result, Elliott divided the class of white students into two groups as brown and blue-eyed students. declared that. According to these explanations, blue-eyed students were cleaner, more successful and higher in every field than brown-eyed students.
Of course, some students reacted to this, but the teacher was able to get out of it by saying that it was scientific (!) facts. To make these differences even more palpable, Elliott made the recess time 5 minutes longer for blue-eyed people. In addition, blue-eyed people were given priority during the meal.
Although they were not aware of such a thing before, blue-eyed students soon adopted the idea that they were superior to others and moved away from them. There were even fights between some students at this point.
There was also an exam at the end of the day. When we look at the results of this exam, it was seen that those with blue eyes, who are highly respected, got good grades, while those with brown eyes remained at low levels. Then the first day closed like this.
On the second day, things turn around:
Elliott, who moved on to the second part of the experiment, faced his students again after a while. With the effect of the previous day, the self-confidence of the blue-eyed people could be noticed. But he said that there was an issue that he needed to talk to them, that the superior one was actually the brown-eyed ones and that he had made a mistake in this context.
After that, all the privileges given to blue-eyed children were transferred to brown-eyed children.
So, is a difference observed?
Absolutely. On the first day, we said that those with blue eyes looked down on those with brown eyes and saw themselves as superior to them. But when privileges were given to those with brown eyes, it was observed that they were not so cruel. This was because they knew what it was like to be subjected to such discrimination.
After that, the students were told that this was just an experiment, and then both groups hugged each other.
Has there been any progress since 1968, when the experiment was conducted?
Elliott carried out this experiment beyond the school boundaries with different groups in different places. In a 2002 interview, he sadly said that the results he had for children in the US in 1968 were the same as those he had for adults in Scotland and Australia in 2002.
“White kids whose fragile egos we worry so much about have been subjected to this fictional discrimination for just a day or even a few hours. This is how black people spend every day of their lives”
Elliott gave this roughly summarized answer to a question he received in a program he attended. In the question in question, the children were told how dare he conduct such an experiment, that black children are used to this kind of behavior, but that white children would not understand it at all.
As might be expected, the experiment did not give Elliott a very good response back then. But in the intervening time, this experiment inspired many different studies and Elliott’s voice was heard.
Sources: Front Line, Smithsonian Erbey Psychology, Development Future, Medium
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