Why haven’t we learned?

CSUB honorary doctorate recipient who broke ground in 1968 with her racial tolerance study sees little progress

By California State University, Bakersfield

July 15^th, 2020

It was the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott arrived in her classroom with an impromptu exercise for her third-graders: Blue-eyed students over here. Brown-eyed students over there. Based entirely on eye color, one group was labeled superior; the other inferior.

That two-day lesson would have a profound impact on the lives of her students and attract worldwide attention for the simplicity of its method and message: Discrimination based on random physical characteristics is wrong and absurd.

What Elliott couldn’t have known at the time was that 52 years later, there would still be a need for that lesson.

“People don’t realize how very racist we are in this country,” Elliott said in a recent telephone interview. “Land of the free and home of the brave. I’m free. Black women have to be brave.”

Elliott, who received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from California State University, Bakersfield, in 2019, is finding herself at the center of renewed attention in recent weeks in the wake of a growing and impassioned racial justice movement, led in large part by young people.

The retired teacher, 86, was proud to receive the honorary doctorate at the 2019 CSUB commencement ceremony, but she is surprised at the attention, which includes articles and interviews in the New York Times and other media.

“Like good Lord. Am I the only one they can find? There must be black women all over the world who have been fighting this all their lives. When you get an honor like that for what you do, you have to remember that black women have been doing that since they were brought here and enslaved and no one gives them awards for it.”

The California State University Board of Trustees, which authorizes the awarding of honorary doctorates, received several letters of support for Elliott from the CSU Bakersfield campus. Among the nominators was Dr. Luis A. Vega, professor of psychology.

“Jane Elliot's diversity training and advocacy has come at a great personal and professional price,” Dr. Vega wrote in his letter of nomination. “As a result of her early work in her hometown of Riceville, Iowa, many of her neighbors ostracized her work and intentions of improving race relations; even some members of her family partook of that anger. To this day, critics abound, but she ploughs ahead, undeterred. She stars in eight documentaries, continues to conduct race relations workshops throughout the country, conducts many interviews, all with the goal of making our society just for all of its citizens.”

President Zelezny supported the nomination, saying that Elliott’s work is as important today as it was when she conducted the exercise in 1968.

“Much of the inspiration I derive from Mrs. Elliott’s lesson is that education has the power to shape the minds of young people at a pivotal time, when they are developing their own views of the world and social conscience,” Dr. Zelezny said. “It is far easier to teach children what is right and just early on than to try to change attitudes later.”

Elliott echoed Dr. Zelezny’s observation.

“People are vicarious learners,” she said, “and can be influenced to know right from wrong.”

Elliott’s path to that fateful lesson of tolerance in her third-grade classroom required a fair degree of self-education, necessitated by the lack of diversity during her impoverished Iowa upbringing. She had little to no contact with people of color.

“You’d hear something ugly on the radio about people of color and then I went to college and there were black students in college who were smarter than me, had more money than me, had been more places than me. And I thought, boy, had I been lied to.”

In the decades after her famous 1968 exercise, Elliott saw signs of progress in racial relations.

“Things were getting better. The civil rights movement made a difference. I was seeing people of color in commercials and on television, I was seeing people of color in the (U.S.) House, Senate, some governors.”

But Elliott believes that the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, revived racial resentments.

“The white supremacists went underground until our present leader came to power, and things are worse than they were in 1968. Racism is a sign of ignorance and bad education.”

The country’s reckoning on racial justice is long overdue, Elliott said, and she is heartened that young people are stepping forward to demand reform and equity.

“Great moments of change in our country’s history usually are the work of young people,” Elliott said. “The injustice we’re seeing, that we’ve seen for years, is sparking a rebirth of civil disobedience and protest, and I say it’s about time.”