The ‘Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes’ anti-racist exercise
Witness History
BBC
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2020
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, US school teacher, Jane Elliott, decided to try to teach her all-white class about racism. She decided to segregate them according to the colour of their eyes, and treated them differently. Although controversial from the start, the “blue eyes/brown eyes” teaching exercise has been adapted in schools and workplaces for diversity training ever since. Jane Elliott has been explaining to Rebecca Kesby why she still thinks the model has value today in defeating racial prejudice.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.0 | Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Rebecca |
| 0:45.8 | Kessby and today we go back to school to one teacher's decision to educate her pupils in the |
| 0:51.7 | damaging consequences of racism and prejudice. |
| 0:55.4 | Jane Elliot came up with her controversial blue eyes, brown eyes segregation exercise |
| 1:01.0 | on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated |
| 1:05.0 | on how to explain it to her children the next morning. |
| 1:09.0 | We have that Martin Luther King has been shot. |
| 1:11.0 | Memphis police just confirmed that |
| 1:13.7 | Reverend Martin Luther King has been shot. |
| 1:16.6 | Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight. |
| 1:19.5 | Memphis... |
| 1:20.5 | I answered the telephone. It my sister she said is your television on I said no she |
| 1:28.1 | said you better turn it on because they shot him and she said Martin Luther King Jr and then everything fell apart for me for about |
| 1:35.5 | three seconds the world stopped turning because Martin Luther King Jr had been my hero for |
| 1:41.5 | a number of years because he was about hope and bringing a better life to all of us. |
| 1:47.0 | On April 4, 1968, Jane Elliot was a primary school teacher in a small town in Iowa. |
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