Elliott is an enigma to me, not only because she is a white woman whobelieves God is black and detests phrases like “reverse racism,” butbecause she comes from a city I know well.
by Corina Knoll (corina.knoll@latimes.com) Reply below*
Jane Elliott has blue eyes.
The years have turned her once-brown hair a bright snowy white, andat 75 years old she’s rounder, maybe shorter, than she used to be. Buteye color doesn’t change.
Elliott, an Iowa teacher, made deliberate use of that in 1968 whenshe created a now-famous exercise for her classroom of whitethird-graders. It was the day after the assassination of the Rev.Martin Luther King Jr., and she was struggling to explain the conceptof racism.
She hit upon an idea: For an entire day, she conducted her class asif the brown-eyed children were superior to those with blue eyes.Elliott eventually made headlines, appeared on “The Tonight Show” andbecame the subject of multiple documentaries.
Three decades later, my high school sociology teacher played ussnippets of a news program about the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise.For a 16-year-old Korean adoptee growing up in Iowa, the mostfascinating aspect was this: Elliott had made history in Riceville, twohours from my hometown.
The daughter of white parents, I grew up in a predominantly whitecity, attended an overwhelmingly white school and interacted mostlywith white friends. The subject of race in my community was hidden,buried under rhetoric that insisted we remain “colorblind.”
Elliott was the first white person I ever heard who admitted to theprivileges of whites, acknowledging that visible differences affect howthe world perceives us. Her words sparked a hunger in me for more.
My first year in college, I took courses on race and ethnicity andAsian American history. Race, I learned, permeated everything, and itwas OK to say so. I found myself with strong opinions and a circle ofoutspoken black and Asian friends with whom to share. The world feltbigger, and I felt empowered.
Much of my decision to move to Los Angeles eight years ago was to answer a longing to live somewhere diverse.
*Dear Ms Knoll;
There is an adage that says the following: “Export your industries to the Third World, import the people of the Third World, and you will eventually have a Third World.”
We’d like to expand the idea behind this maxim to include writers.
Your piece concerning Jane Elliot in which you “thank her” for opening your eyes to “racism” is one of the best examples we have seen in a long time verifying an author’s bigoted mindset. You might as well have agreed to the following statement which Jane Elliot herself could just as easily have written:
“The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.” –Noel Ignatiev from White Skin Privilege.
Since “anti racism” is an idiom you openly embrace, an expression that applies to people of European extraction only, it tells us all we need to know about your fundamental bigotry and anti white supremacism. You should be fired.
Board of Directors
European Americans United
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