Eye Experiment

Not long ago, Professor Blanco played a video for the whole class regarding an experiment by Jane Elliot, a former elementary school teacher and equality activist. She goes around the country and performs this experiment to various locations, including college classes. For the specific experiment we watched, she divided a college classroom up between people with blue eyes and people with brown eyes. She then put the people with blue eyes in the middle of the classroom and had everyone else look at them. Ms. Elliot then began to talk down to the people in the middle and treat them unfairly. The whole thing was to show the blue eyed people, and everyone else in the class, but mostly the blue eyed people how minorities feel everyday. It showed what minorities have to put up with and go through everyday, with being looked down upon or singled out, and it was extremely interesting. It was really hard to watch at times because she would get extremely rude with the blue eyed people and made them feel inferior. However, I really did learn something through the process. I found the most interesting part was when a girl walked out of class and Ms. Elliot said that the girl could walk out of the class and not have to worry but people of color don’t have that privilege. Wherever people of color go, their skin tone goes with them, and in that, so does discrimination. It’s a part of their identity. Being white myself, I will never truly understand what people of color go through.