Exercise or Experiment–– An Account of Jane Elliott’s Tenacity: A Review of Stephen Bloom’s *Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality* by Toni Hays

Jane Elliott, one of the most controversial figures in U.S. education and diversity training, began her journey to international acclaim in Riceville, Iowa. As Elliott recalls, she engineered the “blue eyes/brown eyes exercise” in 1968 after watching the late-night news cycle announce the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than be deterred by possible resistance from school administration or parents, Elliott implemented the “blue eyes/brown eyes exercise” of her own accord. Elliott’s wanted her 3^rd grade class of white children in rural Iowa to understand the everyday prejudices experienced by Black people in America and how racism led to MLK Jr.’s assassination. Without knowing the possible results of her pedagogical approach, Elliott separated her third-grade students into two groups according to eye color––blue and brown (those with green or hazel eyes Elliot would “lump” in with the students with blue eyes) –– to begin teaching her students about the harms of U.S. racism (49). She then proceeded to implement her “exercise” in prejudice by providing privileges and recognition to students with brown eyes, while deprioritizing and denigrating students with blue eyes. On the second day, she reversed roles: students with blue eyes, would receive the privileges and recognition denied them on the first day of the exercise, while students with brown eyes would be subject to Elliott and their peers’ scorn. Elliott had no idea how this classroom “exercise” would catapult her into international acclaim. News of Elliott’s “blue eyes/brown eyes exercise” first circulated through the local Riceville newspaper and was later taken up by The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. From there, Elliott’s late-night fame (or infamy) circulated internationally in the form of two documentary series and later, a career as a public lecturer.

Regardless of the platform, what remained constant throughout Elliott’s career, as Stephen Bloom portrays in Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality, was Elliot’s tenacity and her insistence that non-Black people could only learn about discrimination and prejudice through an experience that produced the same emotional, psychological, and social brutality aimed every day at Black people in the United States.

The original call for Stephen Bloom’s Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality came from Jane Elliott herself. Bloom recalls Elliott’s candor over the phone: “Because I want you to write a book about me” (xi). In response, Stephen G. Bloom writes a comprehensive account of Jane Elliott’s life and the various public opinions and the ethics of the “blue eyes/brown eyes exercise.”  Bloom’s approach to assessing the ethics of Elliott’s anti-racist pedagogy begins at the outset of the monograph. Bloom recounts that whilst on the phone with Elliott, she insisted that her work separating students was an “exercise” and “not an experiment.” While Bloom initially permitted Elliot’s “semantics” to “slide” he asserts that Elliot’s famous “exercise” was always an experiment: “What Elliott had done to eight- and nine-year-olds wasn’t an exercise. To me, a journalist, classroom exercises were trying out innovative writing assignments or singing musical scales… An experiment was something different. It implied unproven and uncertain consequences. To me, Elliott’s separation of students based on their eye color seemed like a risky experiment that raised all kinds of ethical issues” (xi). This example at the very beginning of Bloom’s monograph characterizes how Bloom approaches the remainder of his text where he balances descriptions of Elliott’s work in a way that celebrates her insistence toward changing the anti-black paradigm of the U.S. education system, and also probes if her approach appropriately served the students she taught and the various people she trained.

In Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes, Bloom writes Jane Elliott’s biography and an account of the controversial classroom experiment that catapulted her into the public eye. While Bloom begins the text with how he received the assignment for Elliott’s biography, the author takes a primarily chronological approach to detail how Elliott catapulted herself from a third-grade public school teacher in rural Riceville, Iowa, into a world-recognized public instructor in anti-racism and diversity training. He begins the text with a history of Elliott’s hometown––Riceville, Iowa–– and paints a portrait of the town’s “rural values,” code for Riceville’s commitments to maintaining a community of “Christian, white, churchgoing” folks who do not permit “trusting anyone from anywhere else” (14). From this portrait, Bloom chronicles Elliott’s local and public reception and her indomitable sense of self-conviction across her lifetime as a public-school teacher and public educator. He narrates the emergence of Elliott’s public persona beginning with her appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and ends his text with the contemporary development of Elliott’s career amidst the anti-Asian hate underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, ongoing sexism, highlighted by the MeToo movement and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and recent events underscoring the country’s homophobia and transphobia.

While Bloom does respond to Elliott’s call for a biography about her life, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes frames Elliott’s life as a window into the tenacity and brutality required to begin detaching America from its historical attachments to anti-blackness and white supremacy. In the chapter “Spooner” Bloom details how Riceville habitually alienated Elliott and her family from the community because of the “blue eyes/brown eyes experiment.” After the release of the ABC’s The Eye of the Storm ––the first documentary to portray Elliot’s implementation of the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment–– Riceville blacklisted the Jennison Hotel, the bed and breakfast Jane owned with her husband: “Seemingly overnight, the Jennison Hotel become the site of a community-wide boycott. No one formally organized anything–– but that’s not the way small towns operate–– but business at the hotel dining room nosedived. On the day before the ABC documentary, [Elliot’s parents] had served forty-five dinners. The following Sunday, two people showed up” (138). To the minds of Riceville locals, Elliott had shamed her community by allowing the media to portray the ease with which Riceville children might enact prejudice onto one another. Riceville residents would also extend their disdain for Elliott toward her children and pets, including the Elliott family dog named Spooner: “‘It turns out that a neighbor had poisoned Spooner …Sarah [Elliot’s daughter] would say years later. ‘Mom said it was just to be mean, but we know it was because Spooner belonged to the town’s [N-word] lover’” (143). As Bloom demonstrates, Elliott possessed the tenacity required to attempt detaching herself and U.S. education from anti-blackness. Rather than be deterred by any personal attacks or attack on her family, Elliott persisted in her goal of instructing children about the ills of prejudice and its impact on various non-white people in the U.S. While Bloom retains a commitment to questioning the ethics of Elliott’s experiment, Bloom also provides a sympathetic account for the brutality Elliott’s exhibited by detailing how Riceville reacted to her persona and resisted her desire to change the racist paradigms in her local community and later the world.

The reception and circulation of the “exercise” remains at the heart of the book’s narrative. For example, the text accounts for the various responses and controversies Elliott experienced for her teaching practice. As Elliott’s public persona gained more attention on the college lecture circuit, researchers found that her methods did not guarantee the long-term consciousness raising Elliott desired. Using the reception of Elliott’s exercise, Bloom writes that social scientist Tracie Stewart and other colleagues found that “any crash course to modify racial prejudice” showed “negligible” longer-term benefits for reducing negative racial attitudes (188-189). One of the more troubling moments in Elliott’s career was when Wilda Wood, a sixth-grade teacher in Colorado Springs, suggested that Elliott stole the blue eyes, brown eyes experiment from her own “widely publicized” project entitled “Project Misery.” In this experiment, Wood exposed her sixth graders to “a series of contrived racially motivated incidents” over the course of a week (118). Wood did perform these series of exercises under the advisement of students, parents, and administration.  Unlike Elliot’s series of experimentation, Wood consulted with other researchers in the development of her exercises to support their pedagogical function toward an anti-racist consciousness amongst students. While Elliott was not found liable for intellectual theft, the Wilda Wood case demonstrates how various instructors of Elliott’s time wanted to find ways of teaching children and adolescents about U.S. racism through experiences modeling the prejudice experienced by the Black community in the United States.

Given Bloom’s concern for how Elliott’s methodology was received amongst the public and other educators, the portrait of Elliott’s methodology might have also been situated and compared to existing traditions of anti-racist pedagogy from figures such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks. The text does gesture to how Elliott’s persona has been elevated amongst the “West’s most revered educators,” but does not provide a more extended account for how other educators approach anti-racist or anti-prejudice pedagogical practice (x). While the text does not consider how Jane Elliott’s methods compared to other traditions of anti-racist pedagogy, Stephen Bloom’s Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality provides a strong account for the tenacity required to take on the task of teaching white children in rural America about U.S. racism and the nature of anti-blackness. This is most apparent in how Bloom’s narrative resists uncomplicated narratives of Elliott’s heroism. Rather than lionizing Elliott, Bloom instead recounts how Elliott also participated in anti-Blackness. Bloom shows Elliott’s own complicity in anti-blackness when she planned on renting out her home in Waterloo, Iowa: “When a prospective renter, who to Jane sounded Black, called and asked, “do you rent to coloreds?’ Jane staunchly replied, ‘This is an all white neighborhood!’” (27). Despite her later commitments toward anti-racism, even the esteemed Jane Elliott was not immune to the prejudices she had internalized during her time in the U.S.

In the chapter “A Blind Spot” Bloom compiles the “polarity of opinion” about Elliot’s pedagogy. While some students like Bill Blake emphatically appreciated Elliott nurturing children’s interest in learning, other students like Aaron Dvorak continue to lambast Elliott for her tendency toward favoritism and shaming students.(149-150). According to Bloom, Elliott’s fellow teachers “didn’t quite know what to do about Elliott… Let Jane do what she does was the prevailing attitude. What other option was there? … No one wanted to tangle with her” (35). While Elliott may not have been the easiest colleague to work amongst, Bloom situates how Elliott’s tenacity responded to a world order which naturalized and normalized bigotry. According the Principal Harnack, Jane Elliott’s former boss, one of Elliott’s male colleagues would regularly taunt her in the teacher’s lounge by asking: “‘How are the colored people doing today, Jane’ And he didn’t use the term ‘colored people,’” (151). Per Harnack’s recollection this interaction “was a friendly-type thing,” but as Bloom frames it, “Elliot was surrounded by at least one bigot playing to a half dozen or so other teachers who didn’t have the guts to say or do anything but go along with the instigator” (152 – 153). Despite the various reactions Elliott received, what remains consistent between any account of Elliott is her tenacity and the necessary acerbity she required to confront how racism and sexism have been naturalized and normalized in our past and into our present.

Stephen Bloom’s Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality is a key text to begin the task of understanding the various classist, racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist attachments the U.S. education system continues to retain. Through the life of Jane Elliott, Bloom demonstrates how regardless of an individual’s intent to change discrimination, there is no escaping one’s complicity within the existing systems of prejudice. Through a controversial figure like Jane Elliott, Stephen Bloom shows the necessary discomfort of unlearning the social prejudices that have become so normal and natural to everyday life in America.