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Podcast: Life Elsewhere
Episode: A Shocking Experiment, Examined - Show 447
Description: Stephen G. Bloom - Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality
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 c...