A white American school teacher called Jane Elliot did an experiment in the 1960s called Blue Eyes Brown Eyes to demonstrate the harmfulness of the myth of white superiority and that the way that you treat people can affect whether they feel superior or inferior to others.

Elliott, now retired said that, regardless of whether I voice these thoughts or even acknowledge thinking them, as a White person, I have been raised with a myth of White superiority. After discovering that the pupils that she taught in an all white school in Iowa, USA during the 0960s, had racist views and thought that degrading segregation laws that meant that black people were not even allowed to use the same toilets or drinking water fountains as whites were correct, she decided to take action.

Elliott withdrew her blue-eyed students’ basic classroom rights, such as drinking directly from the water fountain or taking a second helping at lunch. Brown-eyed kids, on the other hand, received preferential treatment. In addition to being permitted to boss around the blues, the browns were given an extended school break.

Elliott recalls, "It was just horrifying how quickly they became what I told them they were." Within 30 minutes, a blue-eyed girl named Carol had regressed from a "brilliant, self-confident carefree, excited little girl to a frightened, timid, uncertain little almost-person."

On the flip side, the brown-eyed children excelled under their newfound superiority. Elliott had seven students with dyslexia in her class that year and four of them had brown eyes. On the day that the browns were "on top," those four brown-eyed boys with dyslexia read words that Elliott "knew they couldn’t read" and spelled words that she "knew they couldn’t spell."

Seeing her brown-eyed students act like "arrogant, ugly, domineering, overbearing White Americans" with no instructions to do so proved to Elliott that racism is learned.

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