The exercise
Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why “that King” (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks[citation needed]. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.[1]
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.[citation needed] The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment’s rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students’ reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes[citation needed].
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another[citation needed]. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.[1]
Controversy surrounding the exercise
According to Elliott, the first reaction to her exercise (Elliott prefers not to refer it as an “experiment”) was in the teachers’ lounge at lunchtime the day she did the exercise for the first time. When Elliott explained what she was doing in her class and why and how a number of shy and slow blue-eyed children were benefiting at the expense of the “brown-eyes”, there was disbelief and confusion. One teacher responded that, “I thought it was about time somebody shot that son-of-a-bitch.” Elliott was shocked and dismayed. Later, the compositions that the children wrote about the experience were printed in the Riceville Recorder on page 4 on April 18, 1968 under the headline “How Discrimination Feels”. This story was picked up by the Associated Press.[1]
Because of the AP story, Elliott was invited to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. After her telling of the exercise in a short interview segment, audience reaction to her was instant as hundreds of calls came into the show’s switchboard, most of the reaction being negative.[1] An often-quoted letter states “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children.”[1]