Anti-racism activist brings her in-your-face style to Santiago Canyon College

After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, school teacher Jane Elliott knew she had a difficult task at hand — explaining to a group of white third-graders in Iowa what racism was.

“We started talking about the killing of Martin Luther King, and I could see these kids weren’t learning a thing,” she said. “They were just regurgitating what they had heard.”

So Elliott, who is white, tried something different that would show her students what prejudice was firsthand.

She divided the class into two groups based on eye color — blue and brown — and gave one group privileges over the other, including extra recess time, exclusive access to the playground equipment and assurances they were genetically smarter. The next day, the groups traded places.

What Elliott witnessed in her now-famous experiment, which was featured in the 1970 documentary “Eye of the Storm,” gave her deep insight into the nature of racism and propelled her subsequent career as an activist against racism, sexism and homophobia.

Last week Elliott, 82, spoke at Santiago Canyon College in Orange in a freewheeling lecture about racism, gender and confronting one’s own prejudices.

“Everyone who considers themselves a member of the white race, please stand,” Elliott said to begin her presentation. About a quarter of the audience rose from their seats. “I’ve got news for you. There is no such thing — there is no white race. Sit down! I don’t ever want to come to this campus again and have you respond to that direction like that again.

“There’s only one race; it’s the human race and we’re all members.”

Elliott, who was wearing a white sweatshirt with the phrase “Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance” printed across the front, then turned to her “blue eyes, brown eyes” experiment.

She explained that the most startling result of the exercise was how quickly her young students absorbed the prejudice she taught them. “These kids were mirroring the behaviors they had seen by the important adults in their environment,” she said.

When the blue-eyed students were the bottom group, Elliott — who has blue eyes — found that her brown-eyed students were quick to talk back to her.

She recounted that a girl said, “How are you the teacher here. You have blue eyes?” Later, Elliott accidentally broke the pull-down map hanging on the classroom wall.

“A brown-eyed girl in the first row said, ‘Well what do you expect. You have blue eyes, don’t you?’” Elliott added.

She also saw dramatic changes in her students’ academic performance.

One brown-eyed boy, who was autistic and had trouble reading, suddenly excelled in spelling. Meanwhile, a blue-eyed girl who had been reading three grade levels above her peers, immediately started making spelling errors that she had never made before. Other students became bullies, verbally and physically harassing the bottom group.

“That would have never happened in my classroom had I not introduced racism by eye color,” said Elliott. “And the confrontations we see in this society would never have happened had we not introduced racism.”

While the students quickly went back to their usual behavior after she ended the exercise, Elliott’s own life was never the same.

“The first reaction in the community was, ‘Why is she doing that? We don’t have any racism,’” she said. “But my kids were spit on and physically abused by their peers, teachers and community. My parents lost their business — no one would eat at the restaurant of the parents of a n-lover. My husband lost all his friends. I would walk through the halls of the school and no one would speak to me.

“Don’t tell me you’re not racist, because if you’re born and raised in the United States, racism is the hidden curriculum.”

But Elliott’s lecture was also punctuated with humor, profanity and crude jokes about Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, who she said “spews excrement” any time he opens his mouth.

Embracing the fact that she’s been called a “bitch” over the years, she said, “Bitch is an acronym for ‘being in total control, honey.’”

Christine Umali Kopp, a psychology professor at Santiago Canyon College and a member of the speaker symposium committee that brought Elliott to campus, said she hoped the lecture would get students and faculty to think critically about the meaning of equity and inclusion.

“She’s skilled at getting people to think about emotional and difficult topics like racism, prejudice and discrimination in a way that’s welcoming and that people can relate to in a very real sense,” said Umali Kopp. “She does it with skills so that she can balance the seriousness and create some levity, so she strikes a good emotional balance in the crowd.”

This emotional balance was perhaps best captured by a line she delivered late in her three-hour presentation, one that underscored her message that society must do away not only with racism, but with the idea of race itself.

“Where it says ‘race’ on those application forms, we’re going to put ‘human,’” said Elliott. “And where it says ‘sex,’ we’re going to put, ‘Yeah!’”