Recently, the Michigan Tech Center for Diversity and Inclusion hosted activist Jane Elliott as a guest speaker. In the mid-1970’s, Elliott performed an experiment on her third-grade class now known as the brown-eyed/blue-eyed experiment. She separated her class and gave the blue-eyed children special treatment. Her experiment escalated, and she managed to convince the class that the blue-eyed children were smarter and more valuable due to skin pigment. In her lecture, she acknowledged that the parents ran her out of town due to the experiment resulting in a great deal of hatred between the two groups of children.
After being twenty minutes late, she began her lecture. She let the audience know that she was not going to pull any punches and bragged that she managed to get three white students to walk out on her earlier lecture that day. Normally I am a fan of provocative speakers, but Jane Elliott wasn’t provocative because of her ideas; she was provocative because she was manipulative and misleading. For example, when talking about her brown-eyed/blue-eyed experiment, she claimed that the evil racists drove her out of town because of her experiment. However, she admitted to starting the experiment without the knowledge of the parents and that the experiment eventually led to the children attacking each other during recess. If a teacher today ran a similar classroom experiment without the consent of the parents (especially an experiment that led to them beating each other), that teacher would be fired or worse. It was misleading to say that she was kicked out of town because of “racism.”
Elliott continued to manipulate the facts. For instance, when talking about race, she claimed the only difference between races is skin color. For someone who studies race, it was surprising that she would say something so incompetent. There are numerous biological differences between the races besides skin color such as bone structure, susceptibility to certain diseases, and muscle composition. While none of these are grounds for mistreating someone, to say race is just skin color is wrong. Someone as involved with race as Jane Elliott would be aware of these differences, so why would she lie? Another interesting point is when she stated, “you white folks just want a border wall because those Mexicans breed faster than you.” This is alarming because there are many criticisms of the wall, but birth rates are not a very strong one. She could have used any other argument but instead went straight to birthrates. Not only does she believe that demographic replacement is occurring, she encourages it.
Outside of being manipulative, she was quite rude. She seemed to have nothing but contempt for anyone who disagreed with her. For example, she went off on a tangent about abortion, and said that any male who is pro-life should just have a vasectomy. That way, they don’t have to worry about impregnating someone and forcing them to get an abortion. I myself am pro-choice, but this shows a laughable lack of perspective about the pro-life stance. Pro-lifers aren’t pro-life because they want to control a woman’s body. They are pro-life because they believe that the fetus is a person and that killing it is akin to murder. It doesn’t make sense to tell them to just get a vasectomy because the issue isn’t birth control, it’s over what constitutes as infanticide. She later went off on another tangent against Social Security, saying that anyone who opposes it hates old people. These are prime examples of the straw-man fallacy.
Jane Elliott is a repulsive manipulator who holds nothing but contempt for white people. She overemphasizes race so much that she said, “my daughter is married to a Saudi Arabian. Saudi Arabia is close to Africa, so it’s like she’s married to a black person!” Not only is Saudi Arabia not part of Africa, but judging by the fact she said, “it’s like she’s married to a black person,” her daughter is probably not married to a black man. Despite all this, I am glad I went to her lecture so I can expose her for who she is.
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That woman in the picture is the actress Jane Elliott, not the activist.