Jane Elliott (born May 27, 1933, in Riceville, Iowa) is an American former third-grade schoolteacher, anti-racism activist, and educator, as well as a feminist and LGBT activist.
She is known for her “Blue eyes–Brown eyes” exercise. She first conducted her famous exercise for her class the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. When her local newspaper published compositions that the children wrote about the experience, the reactions (both positive and negative) formed the basis for her career as a public speaker against discrimination. Elliott’s classroom exercise was filmed the third time she held it with her 1970 third-graders to become Eye of the Storm. This in turn inspired a retrospective that reunited the 1970 class members with their teacher fifteen years later in A Class Divided. After leaving her school, Elliott became a diversity educator full-time. She still holds the exercise and gives lectures about its effects all over the U.S. and in several locations overseas.
Here she is in a recent interview where she expertly destroys racism in less than one minute. I have watched this so many times and its get’s better every time.
There is no space for racism on this planet. We are all part of one race, the human race. I think this epic one minute reply from Jane Elliot deserves to go viral. So please share it far and wide!
