Intolerance in the Iowa Statehouse
A Letter From Iowan Gordie Felger
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In the days after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott taught her students a life lesson in discrimination. Elliott felt her students would learn more from a hands-on exercise than from a verbal lecture.
One day, Elliott divided her class of all-white students. She gave brown-eyed students an armband to wear (later, she used fabric collars). Then she told her class that blue-eyed people are better and smarter than brown-eyed people. She praised the blue-eyed students and gave them extra privileges. She shamed the brown-eyed students and denied them the same privileges.
The blue-eyed students immediately bullied their brown-eyed friends. The blue-eyed students felt superior. Their brown-eyed classmates suffered humiliation and isolation.
Elliott reversed roles the next day. She did this so every student in her class felt the sting of bigotry and discrimination.
Demagoguery happens when an authority figure “others” a group of people based on an arbitrary, unchangeable trait. We see demagoguery in the Iowa Statehouse. Lawmakers pass laws that violate the rights of those they choose to “other.”
Intolerance of LGBTQ+ people is no different than intolerance based on eye or skin color. People are who they are. Legislation based on unchangeable traits is wrong! Yet, every year since 2022, Iowa lawmakers stripped away ever more rights from our LGBTQ+ neighbors simply for being who they are.
Two years after Elliott’s first lesson, William Peters visited her classroom to film a documentary called “The Eye of the Storm.” This film should be required viewing for everyone seeking elected office in Iowa. Better yet, let’s subject all Iowa lawmakers to this exercise. Maybe they’d learn empathy for those not like themselves.
Intolerance is contagious. It spreads to those who are unable or unwilling to resist it. Demagogues abuse it to gain political or social power for themselves. Intolerance is a learned behavior. But so are empathy, acceptance, and compassion. Let's choose these instead.
And, by the way, Jane Elliott taught in rural Riceville, Iowa. In that time and place, the community praised Elliott’s teaching methods. She repeated the exercise over several years with no complaints. But under current Iowa law, it’s a crime to teach “divisive concepts.” Like making white children “feel bad about themselves.” Now, she’d surely lose her job. For teaching children empathy. Think about that.
Gordie Felger
Hiawatha, Iowa
This originally appeared on Felger’s website, wtfiowa.substack.com.
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My friend and former colleague Stephen Bloom at the University of Iowa wrote an entire book about this experiment and the teacher who developed it. It’s a very interesting read and I recommend it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=stephen+bloom+brown+eyes&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
A social studies teacher in Waterloo, IA, replicated this in his classroom.