Blue Eyed

Over the past 20 years, Jane Elliott, a former teacher in the mid-west USA, has committed herself to leading a fight against prejudice, ignorance and racism in society. She continues to practise the same philosophy which she began with her school class after Martin Luther King jun.´s death in 1968. Today her audience is much broader including teachers, students, firemen and even the complete staff of a Bank. In her workshops she devides people on the basis of two arbitrary physical properties – blue or brown eyes. She declares the latter to be better and more intelligent and grants them privileges, privileges she denies to the blue eyed, deemed to be worse, less intelligent and lower qualified. For the first time, many white people become acquainted with the feeling of belonging to a condemned group which can never win. They experience the feeling of being discriminated against, in the same way that society today discriminates against women, people with a different skin colour or the disabled. In only 15 minutes, Jane Elliott manages to build up a realistic microcosmos of society today with all its phenomena and feelings. As already known from the ill reputed Milgram experiment, even participants who knew the 'rules' are unable to remain uninvolved. What starts as a game turns into cruel reality which causes some participants´ emotions to erupt with unforeseen intensity.