Blue Eyed

Jane Elliott is a former teacher from the United States who has been labouring for more than twenty years for tolerance and against racism. Xenophobia, she claims, has not got so much to do with skin colour as with social prejudices like rich and poor, superior and inferior. To show how arbitrary these categories are, she organises courses for various groups of people, like students, factory workers or the entire staff of a bank. In the course she classifies the people into two groups, based on a fairly arbitrary external feature, namely brown and blue eyes. Next she ascribes all kinds of positive qualities to the brown-eyed people. By this simple method many people experience for the first time what it is like to be discriminated against because of their external features.