David BolesDiscrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy
At Brownell Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 1973, my teachers ran a famous experiment on my class, and by the standard they set, I failed it. They split the room in two. The children with brown eyes were told they could command the children with blue eyes, and the blue-eyed children had to obey. I have grey eyes, so the teachers folded me in with the blue group, the way they folded in the hazel-eyed and anyone else who refused to fit the clean binary they wanted. For a day I watched classmates order other classmates to do push-ups, to fetch coats, to answer to the word "master." The teacher delivered the moral with a satisfied smile: "Now you know how it feels to be Black." We had, at most, one or two Black students in the entire school. […]
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