From the film maker of this documentary:
Xenophobia has nothing to do with the color of peoples skin or with their ethnic origin, but it certainly has to do with social categories as superior or inferior, poor or rich, on the top or on the bottom. It is xenophobia that makes woman, homosexuals, the disabled and the old people find themseleves in exile in their own land.
Over the past 20 years, Jane Elliott, a former teacher in the midwest 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 skincolor or the disabled. In only 15 minutes, Jane Elliott manages to build up a realistic micro-cosmos 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 errupt with unforeseen intensity... B L U E E Y E D a Film by Bertram Verhaag BLUE EYED offers a first chance to sit-in on a full-length workshop with America's most celebrated and dynamic diversity trainer, Jane Elliott. Her "blue eyed/brown eyed" workshop, initiated in 1968 as a ground breaking experiment in anti-racist training, has been featured all over the United States on Today, the Tonight Show, Donahue, Oprah, ABC Nightline and PBS' Frontline. Elliott believes, "The film BLUE EYED is by far the most comprehensive and exciting on my work available it sums up 28 years of experience in the emotional impact of discrimination".
In BLUE EYED we join a group of 40 teachers, police, school administrators and social workers in Kansas City - blacks, Hispanics, whites, women and men. The blue-eyed members are subjected to pseudo-scientific explanations of their inferiority, culturally biased IQ tests and blatant discrimination. In just a few hours under Elliott's withering regime, we watch grown professionals become despondent and distracted, stumbling over the simplest commands.
Jane Elliott's approach is especially relevant today. It demonstrates irrefutably that even without juridical discrimination, hate speech, lowered expectations and dismissive behaviour can have devastating effects on minority achievement. Black members of the BLUE EYED group forcefully remind whites that they undergo similar stresses, not just for a few hours in a controlled experiment, but every day of their lives. And Elliott points out that sexism, homophobia and ageism work in the same way.
Back at her Iowa home, Elliott reflects upon how the simple classroom exercise she devised the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination has transformed her life. After her experiment got national television coverage, she recalls, townspeople made threatening phone calls, beat and spit at her children and boycotted her parents' coffe shop, eventually forcing it out of business.
Clips from her original classes and interviews with former students confirm that Jane Elliott's workshops make them permanently more empathetic and sensitive to the problem of racism. Counselors, student program administrators, corporate trainers and psychologists agree BLUE EYED is a film every American needs to experience - what about us?
