Brown Eyes Experiment Summary

In the PBS documentary A Class Divided third grade teacher Jane Elliot tried an experiment to let a class of her third graders experience discrimination. For Jane Elliot’s third grade class in a small town in Iowa discrimination was unheard of because there was only white Christians living in the town. She separated her class based on eye color, so one day she made the kids with blue eyes be superior and the kids with brown eyes be inferior. She did multiple test to see if the way they were treated changed the way they learned. The next day she switched it, so the kids with blue eyes were now inferior and the kids with brown eyes were superior.

Everyone wants to fit in either in school or at work and in the short essay “White Lies”, Erin Murphy discusses how a little girl is being bullied at school and what she does to prevent it. In the fourth paragraph it states, “ All of this changed in mid-October when Connie’s father got a job at a candy factory, news Connie announced tentatively one rainy day during indoor recess” (Paragraph four). Because Connie was an albino she was viewed differently in everyone’s eyes. She decided to announce to everyone that her father worked in a candy factory, therefore everyone would like her. When the news came out everyone started to like Connie because she bought everyone free candy.

How important is it for a person to stand up for what he or she believes in? Barbara Johns had a lot of courage to plan a protest against segregation. Courage is the bravery to do something even if it frightens one. “Imagine This Was Your School”, a article by Teri Kanefield, contains all of the courage and bravery Barbara had to earn equality in schools. Kanefield gives evidence of the disrespect Barbara and the other students faced since they were black.

In Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Jonathan Kozol exploits extreme inequalities between the schools in East St. Louis and Morris High in Rye, New York in the 1990s. The living conditions in East St. Louis were deplorable. There was no trash collection service, the sewage system was dysfunctional, and crime, illness, poverty, and pollution ran rampant. The schools in East St. Louis had a predominately black student population, and the buildings were extremely obsolete, with lab equipment that was outdated by thirty to fifty years, a football field without goalposts, sports uniforms held together by patches, and a plumbing system that repeatedly spewed sewage. In addition, there was a substantial lack of funds that prevented

In Elliott's experiment she gave the kids in the class prejudice and they believed it and enforced it as followers of this stereotype. At the end of her experiment she asks how they felt and the blue eyed said like kings because they were the ones judging the brown eyed while the brown eyed replied they felt like a dog on a leash because even if they wanted to do something they couldn't because the majority that were blue eyed believed against them and the opposite happened the next day. Lee wrote "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.

3). This observation effectively conveys that Lydia is favoured by her father because her blue eyes allow her to blend in more easily as a white American, thus symbolising her perceived and desired ability to assimilate. James' experiences with intergenerational racism contribute to his sense of alienation and his outsider's perspective on the world. His preference for Lydia stems from her blue eyes, reflecting the preordained social acceptance he desperately desires. The reader can discern how James projects his longing for social acceptance onto Lydia, given his history of discrimination.

The Eye of the Storm Jane Elliot was a teacher for a class of eight year olds at a school in Riceville, Iowa. Racism was more of a problem in 1968 than it is today, and Jane was trying to demonstrate to her students what it felt like to be a black person in their society at that time. Her experiment was ran very successfully as her students physically felt how African Americans felt in their society during that time. She separated her class into brown eyes and blue eyes. The first day, the students with blue eyes were better than the students with brown eyes and the opposite the next day.

The plot of the short story, “Brownies”, by ZZ Packer, is of a troop of young girl scouts who are of African American descent. The story depicts them attempting to brawl with another group due to the “brownie” troop assuming another called them a particular insult. Whether the other troop, Troop 909, in called the others a racial slur is left to ambiguity, although it is strongly suggested that they did not in fact refer to them in an invective manner. When the other troop is confronted about it, it is discovered that Troop 909 simply consisted of mentally disabled girls all in one group. Due to this, it is only fitting that the theme of the story was to indicate individuals with disadvantages in life should rejoice and unify rather than combat

The documentary titled, “ A Class Divided” introduces us to the experiment made in an elementary school in Iowa by the schoolteacher named Jane Elliot. The documentary begins with Mrs. Elliot reuniting with the students who she did this experiment with the first time. The students are much older now, and they willingly want to watch the experiment that they were part of when they were elementary kids. The experiment was done days after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs. Elliot has always thought about doing the eye color experiment, but she was never sure of when to do it. She asked her third grade student if it would be interesting to see what would happen if they were judged by their eye color.

A pressing, socio-economic issue seen prevelantly in today’s society is racism. The term has been used for a long time, but has still found its way to stay in the current vocabulary of people in the twenty-first century. The timeless occurence of racism in society has been documented in a piece of literature that enables the horrors of this foulness to forever be known. “Brownies” by ZZ Packer made its way to the shelves in 2003 and has left many in awe of the in-depth perception of how people of the black race were mistreated. The story starts off when a group of black girls were mistreated by a group of white girls at a retreat known as Camp Crescendo (Packer 1).

Jane Elliot was a third grade teacher that tried an experiment with her class to educate her students on the effects of discrimination. Elliot separated her class based on their eye color in order to explain how people are treated differently in the world. She tried to find a way to explain racism in the world in a way that third graders would understand. I was actually surprised when I heard there had been an altercation on the playground the day of the experiment. A blue eyed student teased a brown eyed student which resulted in the brown eyed student engaging in a physical altercation with the blue eyed student.

The brown eyed student had such a boost of confidence their academic score was up and they were trying harder to hold to the title of having brown eyes. On the other hand, the blue eyed students grades were down and they kept this sad era throughout the day. The next day Mrs. Elliott toke back what she about the blue eye students and put it onto the brown eyed students; Mrs. Elliott realize that now that the blues were the more superior they were a lot kinder to the brown eyed students their grades and sprites were lifted and she couldn’t believe the sufficient of change of the students. Although, Mrs.

Modern day classrooms were unheard and unseen of more than 50 years ago. If we were to travel back to the past and step foot in classrooms of that time, one theme would run throughout. More than 50 years ago, classrooms were segregated and spoke volumes about the oppression of the colored population. Before the Civil Rights Movement of 1964 and during slavery, classrooms were split up based on color and were limited resources depending on the color of their skin. (Graglia, 2014)

It is the mother’s vulnerability to the racial standards of beauty that is transmitted to the daughter and ultimately leads to her victimization. In fact, the reason of Pauline’s vulnerability to the racially prejudiced notions of beauty lies in her relationship with her own mother. The relationship between Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist, and her mother, Pauline Breedlove, is ironically characterized by lack of love, and emotional attachment, indifference, frustration and cruelty. Set in a small town in Ohio, during the Depression, The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven year old Pecola Breedlove, who, victimized by the racist society, yearns for blue eyes, which, she believes, will make her worthy of love, happiness and acceptance in the

The Bluest Eyes open with an anecdote of Dick and Jane to show how racism destroys the mental stability of black people. It equates whites with success and happiness while blacks with poverty and unhappiness. This traumatises the minds of Blacks and they begin to dislike their own heritage and skin colour in the white world of Dick and Jane.