In 1992, just after the Rodney King riots, The Oprah Winfrey Show conducted an experiment about racial prejudice that ruffled many of her audience members’ feathers.
Just like today, racial tensions were high, and the experiment proves racism is learned behavior –not an inherent point of view.
Oprah’s audience members were divided into two groups. Oprah explained, “What we did was treat each group differently, discriminating against the people who have blue eyes, catering to those people with brown eyes.”
Prior to entering the studio, audience members with blue eyes were pulled out of the line, told they needed to wear a green collar and to wait outside. The brown-eyed audience members were instructed to step up to the front of the line and were served doughnuts and coffee as the blue-eyed members watched with frustration. It didn’t take long for those with blue eyes to feel upset over the blatant discrimination.
“Look at those people! What are they doing in there?” one woman complained.
Jane Elliott, a diversity expert, was one of Oprah’s guests. She is also the woman who invented this brilliant experiment. Without alerting the audience to this fact, Elliott stated, “I’ve been a teacher for 25 years in the public, private and parochial schools in this country, and I have seen what brown-eyed people have done as compared to what blue-eyed people do. It’s perfectly obvious. You should have been here this morning when we brought these people in here.”
Some audience reactions:
“She was rude to us! All of us!” one woman said. “Yelled at us, called us names, pushed us aside. She was rude!”
“Why doesn’t Jane have a green collar on? She’s got blue eyes,” another asked.
Elliott replied. “Because I’ve learned to act brown-eyed. And the message in this room is, act brown-eyed and you, too, can take off your collar.”
The blue-eyed people were visibly irritated and angry, but what was so surprising was the brown-eyed folks started to believe they were superior and entitled. A woman who had brown eyes said, “People, I had a girlfriend in school who was blue-eyed. She was so stupid, she was always copying off of my papers. These [blue-eyed] people were so rude and so noisy today, we couldn’t hear ourselves even talk!”
Eventually, the audience members caught on and realized the experiment was not about eye color, but about race. Elliott reminded everyone, “God created one race: the human race. Human beings created racism.”
This story was recently profiled on the OWN network on the show, Oprah: Where Are They Now? It’s been twenty-two years since the original showed aired and Elliott explained why she created the blue-eyed-brown-eyed experiment in 1968. She is still fighting racial prejudice today.
Watch the fascinating clip:
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