For forty years, anti-racism activist and educator Jane Elliott ran her famous “blue eyes, brown eyes” exercise, starting with her third-grade class in rural Riceville, Iowa, and expanding it outward to many different classrooms and groups of adults all over the world. The concept of the exercise — along with the no-nonsense way in which she runs it — illustrates her point of view on racism. You may have seen videos chronicling some version of the exercise on the news or on YouTube, but essentially Elliott would separate blue-eyed and brown-eyed students, and hint that one group and then the other were objectively worse than their counterpart. This is intended to give people who have not experienced racism a glimpse into what it is like to be the other. Now that she’s nearly 90 years old and still sharp as ever, the influence Elliott has had is legendary, and she is still active in anti-racist goals, speaking and encouraging folks — especially white folks — to get involved across the United States.
I emphasize “white folks” because Elliott does so. She correctly recognizes that racism is a white problem because the concept of race was conceived of by a white majority and/or ruling class. She repeats that until white people change their perspectives en masse, we will never be able to fully root out racism in all its forms. As I also intimated, her activism has never ceased, even though she stopped actively running the exercise some time ago. Jane Elliott Against the World is partly structured around Elliott leading a campaign to rid a school board in Temecula, California (where many of her kids and grandkids live) of a right-wing leader who is gutting the curriculum of any material which might “cause white students to feel guilty” for past atrocities committed in the name of racial difference. Elliott has always stood firm that her activism is not about guilt, but about a collective responsibility that we all have to each other as human beings to create a better world. Anyone who wants to go backwards is Elliott’s enemy.
Director Judd Ehrlich wisely makes time to explore where these attitudes and ideals arose in someone who grew up in rural Iowa in the 1930s. Elliott was ostracized by her family as a child. She was never the favorite, and it doesn’t seem like she ever needed to be, but that antipathy towards her seems to have been expressed in such a nasty way that she never forgot it. In her words, she realized then “[…] what it was like to be the other.” That seed of empathy, which grew and turned into the “blue eyes, brown eyes” exercise in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., led to a life of such successful activism that even her prejudiced father changed his tune very late in life after seeing one of her exercises.
Her father’s change only emboldened her to believe that anyone could change. I think that’s partly why she doesn’t take any guff from anyone — and perhaps that’s putting it mildly. There’s an infamous clip of a young white woman breaking down in one of Elliott’s exercises, a moment which is touched on in the documentary. It’s indicative of what Elliott wants and needs the world to confront: prejudice hurts because you feel the injustice of it. It’s an injustice because it’s not natural. It has to be learned. Here’s to many more years of Elliott helping the world unlearn it, and major kudos to a great documentary which gives needed insight into the mind of one of the most important educators of our time. | George Napper
Jane Elliott Against the World was featured at the 2026 St. Louis International Film Festival. Further information about the Festival, which runs Nov. 5-15, is available on the festival website.
