Jane Elliott
Actor · b. 1933
American diversity educator. As a schoolteacher, Jane Elliott became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The classroom exercise was filmed in 1970, becoming the documentary The Eye of the Storm. PBS series Frontline featured a reunion of the 1970 class, as well as Elliott's work with adults, in its 1985 episode "A Class Divided".
Movies9
Movie9.0DocumentaryA rural Iowa schoolteacher becomes a national voice against racism after leading a controversial 1968 lesson in discrimination with her all-white third-grade class. Now nearly 90, she refuses to hold back amid today’s fights about race, history, and power after a lifetime of speaking out.
Jane Elliott Against the World
2026 · 2 votes
Movie6.9DocumentaryIn 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 Ms. Elliott's withering regime, we watch grown professionals become despondent and distracted, stumbling over the simplest commands.
Blue Eyed
1996 · 13 votes
Movie8.1DocumentaryTV MovieThe very first documentary about Jane Elliott's educational experiment about discrimination, which was originally produced for ABC News, in which she conducts an unforgettable lesson with her third-grade class in Riceville, Iowa.
The Eye of the Storm
1970 · 7 votes
Movie“Even nice Canadians are racist…” That's Jane Elliott’s starting point as she welcomes and bullies 22 Canadians who volunteered to participate in her renowned workshop. With camera rolling, Elliott divides the unsuspecting participants by eye color – blue eye in one group, brown eyes (many of them Native Canadian) in the other. Elliott turns the tables on the participants, treating the blue eyes as “persons of color,” confronting and browbeating them, while the brown eyes are treated with respect. It illustrates and exposes how systemic racism develops.
Movie8.6DocumentaryWilliam Peters follows up on the 1970 TV documentary Eye of the Storm about Jane Elliott's experiment of dividing an otherwise homogenous group of school kids by their eye color. The episode intercuts footage from Eye of the Storm with new footage of the students, who are now adults. The film takes us through the journey of a young class learning the unfairness of racism. Elliot teaches the lesson through eye color and different treatment. All of the students admit that this is wrong. In footage of the students as adults, we are able to see how this shaped the experiment changed their lives.
A Class Divided
1985 · 7 votes
MovieDocumentaryAre we more racist than we realise? Former teacher Jane Elliot recreates her controversial exercise, as volunteers experience inequality based on eye colour, testing their susceptibility to bigotry.
Movie3.0Documentary39 people have agreed to participate in a self-experiment, without knowing exactly what to expect. In the anti-racism training, the participants are divided on the basis of their eye color in two groups. The blue-eyed will be humiliated, while the brown-eyed will learn how strong the feeling of having power can be and how much it unsettled.
Der Rassist in uns
2014 · 1 votes
Movie10.0DocumentaryThis documentary shows Jane Elliott's blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment set in a college environment with students from diverse racial and ethnic environments.
The Angry Eye
2001 · 1 votes
Movie7.0DocumentaryJane Elliott brings her brown-eye/blue-eye diversity training to Australia, where she explores racism between Aboriginal and white Australians.
The Stolen Eye
2002 · 1 votes