Book Review: "Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality" by Stephen G. Bloom
Including a discussion on the post-liberal mythology of the evil fascist lurking within
I.
On April 5, 1968 — the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. — Jane Elliott of Riceville, Iowa stepped into her third grade classroom and told her students that they were going to ignore their regular activities and instead play a game in which they discover what discrimination feels like. The students all agreed that this sounded good. She separated all of the students by eye color, placing the students into one of two camps: brown eyes or blue eyes (the latter also included green and hazel-eyed students). She then changed her temperament, and proceeded to tell all of her students with the utmost seriousness that the pigmentation in one’s eye color predicts low intelligence, laziness, and overall genetic inferiority, and that blue-eyed students are inferior to brown-eyed students.
She told the class that blue-eyed students will have to be placed in the back of the lunch line, will have to drink from water fountains with paper cups (because of their germs), will not be allowed to play with brown-eyed children during recess, and will have to come back from recess five minutes earlier than brown-eyed children. The blue-eyed students immediately felt terrible and did not want to participate in class, while the brown-eyed students immediately seized on the opportunity to show cruelty towards their blue-eyed classmates, and Elliott did nothing to stop them (as the nature of the activity would dictate). Not only did the brown-eyed students become more cruel, but they also curiously did better work in school, supremely confident in the abilities they were told that they had, with even the weaker students among them showing greater capability than they had before.
After one day of this exercise, Elliott switched the roles of the students, making the blue-eyed students into the superior group, thus leaving the brown-eyed students inferior, and lo and behold! The blue-eyed students outperformed the brown-eyed students, while the brown-eyed students behaved uncooperatively. It was not as pronounced, but it was nonetheless a reversal of what happened the previous day. Before the students had to go home, Elliott told her class about the purpose of this two-day exercise, making sure that they would all know the horrible effects of discrimination. Elliott was teaching the students about the Sioux Indians at the time of King’s assassination, and so she reminded them of the Sioux Indian prayer, “Oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins,” telling them that they had all just experienced what it’s like to walk in a colored child’s moccasins. The students warmly embraced each other, said sorry to each other, some of them cried, and all felt that they had learned a valuable lesson. Having undergone such a harrowing yet profound educational experience, none of them ever chose the path of racism for as long as they lived.
Or, at least, that is the “Hallmark greeting card” version of the story that Jane Elliott and her advocates would prefer you to hear.
In Stephen G. Bloom’s Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality, a much uglier, far more disturbing picture about not only that classroom activity but Jane Elliott’s entire career comes into relief. Elliott had harassed and insulted her own students in that activity quite openly, as we’ll discuss below, and her professional life never suffered any negative consequences for it. Quite the opposite. She went on to build an immensely lucrative career harassing, haranguing, bullying, and intimidating countless other unsuspecting victims, including more children, college students, and office workers — many of whom had no choice but to endure her abuse because it was part of a mandatory sensitivity training course — with far more intensity and malevolence than when she had first begun the exercise. To this day, she maintains that this was all done in the name of anti-racism, but by the end of the Bloom’s book, a different conclusion is virtually unavoidable: Elliott is a genuinely hate-filled person. Her concerns about racism may have been genuine once upon a time, but they gradually came to serve as a mere pretext to unleash her vitriol upon people she doesn’t know other than by way of appearance. Whatever love for black people she might still have (if she ever had any) is almost nothing compared to her boundless, colossal hatred for white people, those of her own kind.
Bloom makes clear in the first few pages that Elliott actually sought him out to write a book about her, but when he started to do serious research about the legacy she had left, she became furious with him and refused to cooperate altogether. As a way of saying goodbye, she left a message on his phone, in which she said, among other things,
Your decision to vilify all the citizens of Riceville because of the behavior of a few is the worst form of discrimination. I won’t tolerate it. I won’t cooperate with it, and I do not choose to be a part of what will now be an unauthorized biography. If you insist on going ahead with this, I’m going to talk with my attorney… just as quick as I get off of this telephone and find out what I can do to get you to stop now [emphasis in original].
Of course, she wasn’t saying any of this to defend the citizens of Riceville at all, a town in which she is almost universally loathed to this very day. She was saying it to defend her own reputation, because she has quite a few skeletons in her closet that she doesn’t want exposed. Whatever Bloom’s motivations were in writing this book (he claims it was in part because of her thinly veiled threat to sue him in that message), he definitely succeeds in exposing them, providing the reader with story after story of Elliott’s inexcusable behavior throughout the course of her career, which left scores of both children and adults angry, hurt, and even perhaps emotionally traumatized. Bloom also calls into question the pedagogical value of Elliott’s activities (all available research on it is inconclusive) as well as her integrity as an educator and activist. Most importantly of all, however, he tells a complex and psychologically convincing story of how one woman hardened herself over the years to become adept in the art of hatred, nurturing within herself a form of it so pure and distilled as to nearly achieve the status of platonic archetype.
II.
Bloom, it should be said, does an admirable job of staying neutral and fair, something most of us would probably be unable to do given the subject matter. But if there’s one decision he makes that I quibble with, it’s his insistence on calling the original brown eyes/blue eyes activity an “experiment.” Jane Elliott, to her credit, makes efforts to correct people who call it an experiment, claiming it was merely a classroom exercise, and although I myself have used the term “experiment” to describe these kinds of popular non-experiments in previous writings, I believe Elliott is correct here. Bloom speculates that she insists upon the term “exercise” because branding it an experiment would have left her susceptible to lawsuits, since experiment participants must give their informed consent, and she never told any of the parents that she was going to try this activity on their kids. He might be onto something, and it’s understandable why he would refuse to comply with her demands. But the problem with calling it an experiment is that it nevertheless raises the perceived value of this activity beyond what it ever could hope to achieve.
Part of Elliott’s hypocrisy, which Bloom never addresses outright, is that the story of her activity is immensely popular partly because it hints at being a legitimate demonstration of how quickly normal people can become authoritarian and oppressive, like Philip Zimbardo’s fake and thoroughly debunked Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo in fact cites Elliott in one of his later books). It also hints at being a legitimate demonstration of stereotype threat. It is, in fact, neither of these things, yet so many unquestioning recapitulations of her activity (such as this popular YouTube video) describe it as an “experiment” precisely because they feel there are important lessons to be learned, and experiments, after all, are official-sounding things. Elliott’s account encourages people to take what she did as seriously as you would an actual, competently executed scientific study, and her preferred term to describe what happened is the only thing suggesting otherwise. But in truth, her preference is right. It wasn’t an experiment; it was just a dumb, irresponsible activity from which no insights into the human condition could be gained.
So, just how unhelpful was Elliott’s classroom activity in teaching us anything about humanity? Well, for one thing, she didn’t exactly leave the students alone and allow them to behave autonomously once she had divided them up by eye color, changed the rules, and told them the pseudoscientific information about pigmentation and melanin. Much like Zimbardo and his team, as well as the research teams of other debunked experiments (like the Robber’s Cave experiment of 1954), Elliott inserted herself into the children’s activities every step of the way, actively encouraging the brown-eyed students to be cruel to the blue-eyed ones. Here’s a choice excerpt, and this is nothing Elliott herself would deny:
The empowered brown-eyed kids proceeded to berate the blue-eyed children mercilessly, and Elliott did nothing to stop them. Instead, she egged them on. When a blue-eyed boy mumbled an answer, Elliott raised her voice and ordered, “Speak up, James!” James was tongue-tied. He slumped in his chair, drooped his shoulders, and said nothing. “Well, whaddja expect, Mrs. Elliott?” one of the brown-eyed boys up front volunteered. “He’s got blue eyes!” “That’s just how those blue-eyed people are!” Elliott crowed. “Isn’t that true?” “Yes, Mrs. Elliott” came the reply, this time from all the children.
It would perhaps be one thing if that had been the only instance in which Elliott fashioned the kids’ attitudes, but the other stories from the students who participated in the exercise demonstrate the extent to which she involved herself in their affairs:
For the rest of the morning, Elliott was unrelenting. While on the playground, brown-eyed Bruce Fox would later recall, “Mrs. Elliott told a boy who was getting bullied that the next time that happens, ‘You smack ’em in the nose.’ She put her fingers together in a fist to show how it ought to be done.” If blue-eyed students were playing jump rope or kickball, Fox remembered, Elliott urged the brown-eyed kids, “You take it away from them! That’s your right! Do it!” A brown-eyed student, Debra Anderson, recalled, “One of my friends had blue eyes, and I couldn’t play with her. I kinda hung out by myself and played on the swings and the monkey bars. I felt sick.” Green-eyed Julie Kleckner, who’d been folded in with the blue-eyed kids, tried to play with two brown-eyed girls but they pushed her away. That was bad enough, but back in the classroom, Elliott humiliated Julie by ordering her to kneel in front of everyone and apologize to the entire class.
It should be rather clear that we can’t learn anything from this situation if Elliott, an authority figure, had continuously barked out orders for her eight-year-old brown-eyed students to be cruel, not allowing them to behave otherwise.
Since this activity began on a Friday, the students lived with her lie about brown-eyed genetic superiority for the whole weekend, and then on Monday, she decided to switch the roles, with the brown-eyed students playing the role of the inferiors. It didn’t work as well on the second day, as the students were relatively muted in their hostility towards one another. Elliott speculates that the blue-eyed students didn’t want to be cruel after having experienced cruelty themselves, but it’s also possible that by arbitrarily switching the roles, she made it clear that the claims she made earlier about genetic superiority were fake, and thus the students realized that something fishy was going on. It is also unclear just how dramatically Elliott herself egged the students on during the second day. The only thing that Elliott did successfully was put her students through an ordeal. And perhaps that’s the best term to describe what this classroom exercise was.
Additionally, it is highly unlikely that Elliott came up with the idea herself. She claims that she had thought of it immediately after King’s assassination and that she got the idea to discriminate based on eye color from the Leon Uris novel Mila 18 (1961). But the problem is, there was no eye color discrimination that occurred in this novel. It’s possible that Elliott simply misremembered some detail, but there’s also a more likely explanation. From 1965-1969, a similar classroom ordeal for sixth graders called “Project Misery” was performed by Wilda Wood in Pine Valley Elementary school in Colorado Springs, and it was apparently widely publicized, though Google searches for her now return very little. Her methodology was a lot more complex than Elliott’s. According to Bloom,
Wood limited discrimination based on eye color just to the last day. With Wood’s experiment, there was a weeklong buildup. The children were programmatically introduced to arbitrary rank and privilege, culminating in the fifth day, when the blue-eyed boys were isolated based on their eye color. Wood also advised the administration, her students, and their parents about what was to happen. Nonetheless, the similarity between the two experiments was curious.
To this day, the residents of Riceville are hung up on the fact that Elliott probably didn’t come up with the idea by herself (and she agrees, coyly arguing that the Nazis, in fact, are the ones who came up with it). But I think this point is largely irrelevant. During the 1960s, simulation-based teaching activities were highly in vogue. Aspiring teachers learned all about them in teaching colleges, and the idea of simulating real-life racial discrimination by substituting eye color is, let’s face it, not particularly inventive. But I’m including this detail to demonstrate that Elliott had a predecessor, and if Elliott indeed got her idea from Wood yet invented a bogus story as to its origin, then it puts much of her own testimony into question. Moreover, Wood at least handled the same basic idea with more professionalism, and her execution of the ordeal seems as though it came significantly closer to what we would call an actual experiment with perhaps some useful takeaways. The reason Elliott’s work became more famous, however, was because of her level of comfort with the camera and her knack for self-promotion, not to mention sheer dumb luck. Post-WWII America was looking for a certain kind of narrative about racism and the Nazis, and Elliott was the most charismatic person to deliver it.
III.
Having told some people about this experiment through social media, the most common response I’ve gotten is, “Surely she got fired for this, right?” or “Why didn’t the parents sue?” But nothing of the sort happened. For one thing, in the late 1960s, corporal punishment in schooling still was common and parents were in general much less litigious than they are now, so the thought of lawsuits was probably not on the table for anybody. And besides, she was too protected by her teachers’ union to get fired. But perhaps just as importantly, Jane Elliott was well known in that very small town of about 800 people, having lived there her whole life. She was the daughter of a Catholic and a Baptist, itself a minor controversy, and she always had held a chip on her shoulder from a young age, though it worsened after she returned from the small nearby teacher’s college as a young adult with a bachelor’s degree. Everyone who knew her described her as bossy, demanding, and difficult to get along with, but she did manage to get married and have four children. She may have rubbed people the wrong way, but Jane Elliott was still a tolerated if not altogether beloved member of the community.
That all changed, however, when she published her story about the classroom exercise in a local paper, and inexplicably got an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and her career ballooned from there based solely on that perverse classroom exercise, which she continued to do for years, over and over again. An ABC documentary about it was made in 1970 called Eye of the Storm, in which she recreated the activity (this time starting with the brown-eyed students, which I suspect she did strategically to appear less blatantly anti-white for a mass audience). And her media appearances and speaking engagements continued to rise, with her sometimes generating more money in a weekend than she would earn as a teacher during the entire school year. At that point, the town pretty much turned against her and her family.
Parents were allowed to transfer their kids away from Elliott’s third grade classes, and many did, but the residents of Riceville still grew to dislike her. It doesn’t seem that they were horrified by her teaching methods so much as they grew to resent her due to her ideology and especially her personality. Correctly, in my view, they perceived her as a fame-obsessed opportunist. And so, they decided collectively to take matters into their own hands. If she can’t get fired, they figured, we might as well drive her out. Things then got ugly. Elliott’s children were mercilessly bullied, one of her teenage sons was constantly physically assaulted by the other schoolboys, and the whole family got used to being called “nigger lover” over and over again. One resident even poisoned their family dog to death. In response to all of this, the Elliotts eventually moved to another town in Iowa — mostly to protect their children — but Jane refused to stop teaching in Riceville, commuting to work each day. This might seem like a curious decision, but it provides a real insight into Elliott’s thought process, which apparently went, I can’t let them win.
Refusing to swallow her pride, Jane Elliott continued to teach in Riceville for over a decade after she administered her first classroom ordeal, even though none of the other teachers liked her and the whole town despised her. From what I gather, it was during that time from about 1970 to the mid 1980s that Elliott sucked in all of that hatred inside of her and made it a living part of her very being — hatred from not just the townspeople but also the unexorcized hatred she felt towards them. She absorbed it and nurtured it, treating it as a festering wound that she would simply refuse to let close, instead widening and deepening it as a matter of principle. It grew and grew until finally she left Iowa and decided to take her act on the road.
IV.
Jane Elliott was never fired from her teaching job in Riceville, but the school board eventually denied her request to spend 180 days in Colorado. US West, a major American telecommunications company, had asked her to administer her brown eyes/blue eyes activity to their multi-state employees in a suburb of Denver as part of their worker training program, and Elliott’s activity was to be part of something called “pluralism experiences.” These sorts of worker training programs gained popularity starting in the 1970s, often being labeled names such as “team building,” “large group awareness training,” “consciousness raising,” and “transformative leadership,” and they were typically known for bland, feel-good, up-with-people sentimentalism. But Jane Elliott transformed the whole concept of the “pluralism experience” into that of a nasty, harrowing experience, deeply uncomfortable for everyone involved. According to one former trainee, Julie Pasicznyk,
“Right off the bat, she picked me out of the room and called me ‘Barbie.’ That’s how it started, and that’s how it went all day long. She had never met me and she accused me in front of everyone in the room of using my sexuality to get ahead. She accused me of sleeping with my bosses because that’s the only way women like me get promoted. She said I’d gotten by on my appearance all my life.”
“Barbie” had to have a Ken, so Elliott picked from the audience a tall, handsome man and accused him of doing the same things with his female subordinates. She went after “Ken” and “Barbie” all day long, drilling, accusing, ridiculing them.
“People left crying,” recalled Pasicznyk. “Or they just sat in their seats crying.” To many, it seemed like Elliott’s goal was to break the employees. “It was all so vicious, so assumptive, so not true and hateful. She was self-righteous and cruel. She clearly picked on the people she had resentment for just based on appearances. It went beyond the pale. It was like someone had slapped you in the face and kept slapping you. She wouldn’t stop.”
Elliott’s relationship with sex is a potentially fascinating topic that we’ll probably never be able to fully analyze. Earlier in the book, Bloom recounts an anecdote from a former Riceville High School student who was asked by the town library to publicly display some of his art, which included nude figure work drawn in charcoal, and Elliott, who had no affiliation with the library, decided to censor and deface it with tape overnight, completely on her own accord.
Anyways, another former trainee at US West, Sandy Juettner, recalls an even more disturbing experience during one of these diversity ordeals:
“The people in the brown-eyed group were supposed to pick on the blue-eyed group and hurl insults at them. There was one woman in the blue-eyed group, and her daughter had recently died from cancer. I don’t know how [Elliott] found out about this, but she also discovered that the woman was a smoker. So, she honed in on that and told this woman that it was her fault that her daughter had died of cancer. She went on and on, hammering this poor woman. The woman was beside herself. She was hysterical. She was crying and was inconsolable, and she wouldn’t let up. She kept on her all day.”
Elliott’s version of “Ken” for this workshop was a white Vietnam veteran. “She said he was a ‘baby killer.’ That, because he had been in Vietnam, he had killed babies. It was unconscionable. This wasn’t about racism. It was about how cruel she could be. It was uncontrolled cruelty. She wouldn’t stop.”
Eventually, Elliott was let go in 1988, which means that she had done these things for a few years. In 1992, a lawsuit was filed against US West regarding her behavior, and although the court initially ruled against US West, the decision was later reversed in an appeal. Elliott essentially “failed forward,” because although she was dismissed by US West, she went on to make numerous appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show and started a highly lucrative college lecture circuit, which gave her the opportunity to engage in more of her nasty behavior while making an incredible fortune. A videoclip showcasing her methods can be found here:
V.
Now, for those wondering what exactly the appeal behind any of this is, the most popular comment in the above video’s comments section, with 8.7 thousand upvotes, gives us a clue:
She literally proved her point.. when Karen doesn't like the way she's being treated, she can just walk away. But us Black people can't just walk away, because it's everywhere we go — RACISM is everywhere!!!
It’s pure, unmitigated resentment towards not just whites, but basically any white person who seems healthy, attractive, or well-adjusted. (“Karen,” in case the reader hasn’t figured it out, is an anti-white racial slur, the equivalent of “Mick,” “Guido,” or “Shaniqua.”)
But that comment also underscores just how utterly incongruous the average experience of an American black person is with what’s going on here. What, exactly, is this commenter trying to walk away from? If black people had to endure Jane Elliott’s behavior during these little struggle sessions on a daily basis, surely we would be hearing about it more often; blacks would probably start seriously thinking about leaving the country. But it just isn’t so. To give an example of just how seldom black people really endure racist confrontation on average: in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), a wildly praised book purportedly about the evils of structural racism, he makes it completely clear that the vast majority of the direct abuse he has ever taken has come from other black people, not whites. In fact, the only story of white people behaving rudely he’s able to present is in an anecdote about a white woman in a crowded escalator pushing his four-year-old kid and yelling, “Come on!” And that’s about it. His whole life, and that’s all he’s got.
Of course, whites were more openly racist towards black people in 1968 when Jane Elliott began her classroom ordeals. But it stands as a fascinating question as to why, as things continued to improve in that area, Elliott decided to be increasingly brutal, nasty, intimidating, and vile, thus obliterating the experiment’s original premise about simulating discrimination. In effect, she turned her original class activity into a kind of sublime humiliation initiatory rite, something aspiring middle-class white professionals must go through in order to earn enough money to move to the suburbs, safely away from all the black people who in reality are far more intimidating towards them than vice versa.
One of the most trenchant points Bloom makes in his book is that Elliott never knew a thing about the black experience in America. Riceville was an all-white town, and her exposure to black people was very limited. By the time she had conducted her first classroom ordeal, the lived experience of black people was to her merely an abstraction, and there’s no evidence to suggest she ever tried to educate herself on that matter any further. To this day, whenever black people tell her that they haven’t experienced discrimination like the kind she simulates in these activities, she simply tells them they’re wrong, as she did with black conservative Jesse Lee Peterson in this interview. Other anecdotes I’ve personally heard recall the same behavior. And in her 1992 appearance on Oprah, Elliott regularly talks over the host and interrupts her, ranting and raving on a variety of subjects, sometimes quite unrelated to what she’s there to discuss. It’s nearly impossible to avoid the suspicion that Jane Elliott doesn’t particularly care about anything that actual black people have to say, that is, unless they’re agreeing with her.
VI.
The main reason I read this book was that I’m interested in the various social psychology studies and tales that have collectively built together a mythology about the human condition, one that takes a rather dim view. A major example is Stanley Milgram’s famous shock experiments. Others include the aforementioned Robber’s Cave experiment as well as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Still another is the Third Wave pseudo-experiment, which I’ve discussed extensively here. The Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes classroom exercise/ordeal/pseudo-experiment belongs to this series of myth-building stories that have proliferated around America and Europe in a manner approximating that of folklore. The main things these stories all have in common is that they’re meant to convey a deep truth about the human condition, one which tells us we should always second-guess ourselves because we’re always merely a stone’s throw away from becoming horrific tyrants.
When the importance of these stories is being pitched, Hitler is almost always invoked. For instance, Stanley Milgram’s experiments were first brought to the public attention in a made-for-TV movie called The Tenth Level in the mid-70s, and the very first thing you hear is Adolf Hitler talking. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment was originally meant to be used as a way to promote prison reform, but eventually it became used regularly as a way to analyze Hitler and the Nazi regime. The Third Wave, for its part, was supposed to be a direct simulation of how the Nazis functioned. And the brown eyes/blue eyes exercise was purportedly inspired by a depiction of the Nazis from Mila 18 (though this isn’t actually in the book). Additionally, Theodor Adorno’s published sociological research in 1950 on the “authoritarian personality,” a concept that undergirds much of these individual stories, and Adorno’s persistent goal was to understand how seemingly civilized bourgeois individuals like the Germans of the 1920s could have become Nazis. Adorno’s work has since been widely rejected by sociologists and even treated as an example of how not to conduct good research, and yet the concept of the authoritarian personality has resurfaced over and over again — typically invoked to explain support for any politician who isn’t approved of by the United States corporate media.
Every single one of these “experiments” I’ve mentioned has fallen under intense scrutiny, and each time, they have all been shown to lack scholarly rigor and integrity. Two of them, the Milgram shock experiments and the Robber’s Cave experiment, have been discredited by psychology historian Gina Perry in two separate monographs. And, as mentioned before, the Stanford Prison Experiment has fallen under immense scrutiny and been thoroughly debunked. Another two of them, Jane Elliott’s exercise and Ron Jones’s Third Wave project, weren’t even conducted as experiments but rather class activities, but they took on the status of legitimate experiments in the public eye, mainly because psychology textbooks repeatedly cited them as valid anecdotal demonstrations of what Milgram and Zimbardo supposedly discovered. Additionally, Philip Zimbardo has favorably mentioned the Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes and Third Wave exercises in two separate books, and media coverage of Jane Elliott has frequently quoted world-famous child psychiatrist Robert Coles as saying that her classroom exercise was “the greatest thing to come out of American education in a hundred years” (as Bloom later demonstrates, this quotation is fake).
How, exactly, has it been possible to assemble such a pervasive mythology about man’s perennial proximity to fascism with nothing but bogus, or at least highly flawed studies and anecdotes? In my concluding discussion on the Third Wave, I neglected to answer that question, focusing instead on the manner in which these and other metapolitical stories have circulated; first, in the electronic, then in the digital era (this is, after all, mainly a blog that deals in media ecology and semiotics). But I believe the answer to this question is largely ideological. All of these stories appeal to various mainstays of classical liberalism — such as the belief in scientific free inquiry, individualism as opposed to groupthink, and the importance of eschewing blind trust in authority — yet all betray a worldview that has little in common with what the British liberals of the 19th century believed.
In the Milgram experiments, we supposedly learn that normal people will descend into depths of unspeakable depravity simply because an authority figure tells them to do so. In the Zimbardo experiment, we learn that normal people will do the same simply because of unchecked, arbitrary social arrangements. The Robber’s Cave experiment teaches us the same thing, but this time it happens because of arbitrarily designated ingroup/outgroup status. The broad cultural takeaway from all these stories collectively has been that man carries within him an array of innate fascistic impulses, all of which can be removed from our society through a combination of both education and the therapy industry. In other words, authoritarianism occurs quite naturally and instinctively in both individuals and small, semi-autonomous groups (i.e., the organic communities that contra Patrick Deneen and his friends, 19th century liberals both historically welcomed and in fact defended). But they must be massaged out of the subject, decanted through a process of slow and deliberate personality management.
Keeping that ideological angle in mind, Jane Elliott is a particularly apt figure in showing how this post-liberal mythology helped inspire present day America’s constellation of various attitude-massaging initiatives in white-collar environments, such as university orientations, employee sensitivity training, diversity training, sexual harassment prevention training, and so on. In 1968, Elliott was marketing her classroom exercise as not just a transformative experience but also a novel discovery about human behavior, even as she insisted that she merely had led an exercise and not an experiment. But by the mid-80s, the pretense of scientific discovery had more or less vanished while she continued the exercise in a corporate setting with a focus on altering people’s behavior, thus becoming a forerunner of diversity training, as her fawning Wikipedia page states. Her own career transition lays bare the upshot of this secularized neo-Calvinist account of man’s total depravity.
One of the major takeaways of this post-liberal mythology is that everyone will invariably conform to an environment that turns them into fascists (or whatever), because the atavistic call of the wild within them is simply too alluring to resist. But often exceptions do in fact occur, and they subsequently turn into inconveniences; little bumps in the road to be either buried or explained away — certainly not reasons to re-evaluate the conclusions altogether. For instance, with the Robber’s Cave experiment, the researcher Muzafer Sherif tried out the experiment once and none of what he predicted happened at all. So he simply did it all over again, this time making sure that he could get his subjects to become violent and fascistic, not mentioning the first failed version in his writeup. In Ron Jones’s Third Wave activity, one girl completely rejected his “Third Wave movement” and in fact revolted against it until the bitter end. Unsurprisingly, Ron Jones never mentions her in his first account of his classroom activity.
And similarly, in Jane Elliott’s second time administering her classroom ordeal, one third grade student with brown eyes stood up and completely rejected her claims about brown-eyed superiority right as she made them, screaming over and over that it’s not true. Again, this incident is never mentioned in any popular summaries of Elliott’s work (I’m not even sure that Elliott ever told it before the publication of Bloom’s book). The students who resist these exercises almost never get rewarded for their bravery or lionized as heroes. At most, they amount to a problem, since they threaten the construction of this mythological account of human nature. But once Elliott had begun doing her proto-diversity-training, that problem could finally go away. As Bloom explains [my emphasis],
Her secondary goal [in her US West training sessions] was to see how long the blue-eyed group would take the mistreatment before getting up and walking out. Or how long the privileged brown-eyed participants would allow Elliott to continue. Or how either group could tolerate such behavior before standing up to her. By doing nothing, they were implicitly endorsing Elliott’s methods. For most participants, though, confronting Elliott was impossible. The participants were getting paid to be there and finish the workshop; they were all supposed to be on the same corporate team. No one had advised them of the game’s rules.
So in other words, no one was willing to lose their job just to confront Elliott. And, of course, once she got rid of that potential problem of uncooperative participants (whom she really didn’t want to be there and never would’ve rewarded even had they rebelled), she had fully confirmed her initial premise: namely, that everyone involved in the situation is guilty because they’re blindly following authority. Curiously, the solution is then that more rather than less personality management is required, since no one involved can actually be trusted when left to their own devices. Jane Elliot is an evil authority figure, but she’s also the only valid authority figure no matter what. Heads? I win! Tails? You lose!
But the ultimate winner, of course, is the managerial therapeutic state, the only thing that can properly eliminate fascism within each and every tarnished individual and natively corrupt community.
Bloom, of course, does not delve into these abstract metapolitical matters in his book. He’s more interested in piecing together the nuances of Elliott’s psychology, which he does quite well. But his extensive look at her and her motivations offers plenty of grist for those who might see her story as a significant point of departure for analysis in adjacent areas of inquiry. Check out the book if you want to read the story of one of the most hate-filled bitches of all time, the living embodiment of the mentality captured in this R. Crumb cartoon: