Fighting Hate With Hate

Days before the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, a car bomb desecrated a five-story hotel in Baghdad, killing seventeen people and wounding at least forty. No matter what the complex politics of this act, the truth is that somebody did it because they hate somebody else.

I teach my fourth-graders over and over: Don’t hate people. These kids are so good-hearted, I think they’re really getting it. Then somebody calls somebody else a fatso, and that kid calls the other kid stupid. And one tells me that the other one hates him, and then the other one starts to cry. And I know these kids: one really is afraid of being a fatso, and the other really is afraid of being stupid, and they’re both wounded and angry, and they’re both good kids. Now they’ve got to sort it out and forgive each other, or else the anger festers and turns hard. So I help them listen to each other, and then we start again.

I have yet to find a faster route, a more drastic means of teaching human decency and acceptance. But others have tried. On April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Jane Elliott tried. That morning, in the tiny, all-white, all-Christian town of Riceville, Iowa, the third-grade teacher threw out her lesson plans and walked into her classroom with a terrible, powerful idea for one of the most memorable and controversial classroom experiments in American education: the brown-eyed/blue-eyed exercise.
Elliott had talked about discrimination countless times, but still her students carried the persistent assumptions of their time and place—a place without a black person in sight, but with plenty of negative stereotypes anyway. She suggested that it might be fun to divide the class for two days into groups based on eye color; they would pretend that one group was better than the other on the first day, then switch roles on the second. “Would you like to do that?” she asked the class cheerfully. “Yes! Yes!” they chorused, hands raised dutifully in the air.

Elliott explained the rules. Being on top meant five minutes’ extra recess, second helpings at lunch, always getting in line first, and lots of praise and compliments from the teacher. Being on the bottom meant not being allowed to use the drinking fountain (“Brown-eyed children will have to use paper cups, of course”), shorter recesses, no seconds at lunch (“You know those brown-eyeds will take too much”), and constant put-downs from Mrs. Elliott. Inferiors also had to wear cloth collars so there would be no mistaking one sort of person for another.

Elliott watched her normally kind, cooperative class turn nasty within fifteen minutes. Name-calling and fights erupted. Inferior children turned in poor schoolwork. Superior children offered Elliott advice about how to keep the inferior children in line, such as placing the yardstick within reach at all times.
Elliott hated the immediate effects of her eye-color exercise, but believed that it got through in a way nothing else had. She repeated it year after year; today, she tours the globe teaching it to adults, while teachers everywhere have repeated it with students across the grades.

In 1970, ABC News produced Eye of the Storm, a documentary showing Elliott conducting her exercise with her third-grade class. In 1985, Frontline’s “A Class Divided” documented a 1984 mini-reunion of those third-graders, now speaking as adults about the positive effects of Elliot’s lesson. One woman recounts with a potent freshness the hatred she felt for Mrs. Elliott during the experience.

“A Class Divided” is one of the most requested programs in Frontline’s twenty-year history. “I absolutely hate this exercise,” Elliott told Frontline in a 2002 interview. “But the worst of it is that it is as necessary today as it was in 1968.”
I understand why people laud Elliott and her work. But still, I just don’t know. I watch the expression on a small girl’s face some thirty years ago as Mrs. Elliott points out, “Laurie is not ready yet… What color are Laurie’s eyes? Yes, Laurie is a brown-eyed. You’ll notice we spend a lot of time waiting for brown-eyed people.” The camera zooms in on Laurie’s face collapsing. I cringe.

Teaching is inefficient, muddy work. But with all due respect, I cannot imagine doing the brown-eyed/blue-eyed exercise with young children. I’m bound to the challenge of teaching them not to hate without manipulating their capacity to hate in the process. Can children understand discrimination, oppression, or violence without experiencing them for themselves? I think they can, I really think they can. And it is we who must teach them.