SOCIAL ENGINEERING

RACISM

Jane Elliott was a former school teacher who is recognized most prominently as an anti-racism
activist and educator on discrimination.
She created the famous blue-eyed / brown-eyed exercise, first done with grade school
children, shortly after the unresolved murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1968.
Shortly after MLKs death, Ms. Elliott asked what her students knew about black people. The
children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and
other labels commonly given to Native Americans and Black people.
She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be
treated the way a person of colour is treated, mentioning that it would be interesting if there
was segregation based on eye colour instead of skin colour. The children enthusiastically
agreed to try the exercise.
The first reaction to her exercise was in the teachers lounge at lunchtime the day she did the
exercise for the first time. When Elliott explained what she was doing in her class and why
and how a number of shy and slow blue-eyed children were benefiting at the expense of the
brown-eyes, there was disbelief and confusion.
One teacher responded that, I thought it was about time somebody shot that son-of-a-bitch
[i.e. Martin Luther King]. Elliott was shocked and dismayed.
Unfortunately Ms. Elliot and her family were also persecuted from April 1968 onwards, as a
result of the success of her social exercise in a childrens classroom.
The original idea for the exercise came from Leon Uris novel Mila 18 published in 1961,
about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
One of the ways the Nazis decided who went to the gas chamber, according to the novel, was
based upon eye colour.
Social engineering is a discipline in social science that refers to efforts to influence popular
attitudes and social behaviours on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups.
The term sociale ingenieurs was introduced in an essay by the Dutch industrialist J.C. Van
Marken in 1894.
Institutional racism describes any kind of system of inequality based on race. It can occur in
institutions such as public government bodies, private business corporations (such as media
outlets), and universities (public and private).
The definition given by William Macpherson within the report looking into the death of
Stephen Lawrence was:
the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to
people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.