Now Jane Elliott’s critically award winning Blue Eyed is available in a more useful, more concise version concentrating all the drama and insight of the original into an even more powerful 30-minute video. Jane Elliott’s “blue eyed-brown eyed exercise” is one or the most acclaimed and most widely used diversity training tool ever developed. It has been covered by numerous television documentaries like CBS’ Eye of the Storm as well as appearances on the Today, Tonight, Donahue and Oprah shows. In 1996 Ms. Elliott made Blue Eyed, a special 90-minute film designed for use in the workplace and later an abridged 60-minute version, The Essential Blue Eyed. Thousands of copies are in use in colleges, government agencies and corporations across the country.

But diversity trainers have told us that 90-minute and even 60-minute programs are just too long to use in some training seminars and workshops, especially given the emotional and controversial discussions Jane Elliott invariably arouses. Therefore, we have produced a special The Thirty-Minute Blue Eyed which is both more focused and packs more impact than the other versions.

Jane Elliott believes that the best way to fight racism and sexism is to make people experience it themselves, even if only for a brief period in a highly controlled environment. She divides a group arbitrarily between brown and blue eyed participants and then subjects the blue eyed participants to a regime of abuse, intimidation and disrespect. It is amazing to watch how in just a few minutes trained professionals become so distracted they stumble over even the most rudimentary tasks. Black members of the group confirm that this is the kind of treatment they must live with every day. Interspersed between these clips, Jane Elliott describes the origins of her exercise in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and its personal consequences in making her a pariah in her home town in Iowa.

Blue Eyed has proven itself an effective tool for helping adults understand the pressures they and society at large place on certain classes of citizen, not just African Americans, but other minorities, women and the disabled. The film can shock people out of their complacency and realize that racism is alive and well in the American workplace. Now The Thirty-Minute Blue Eyed video makes this unforgettable experience available in a convenient form which allows its powerful message to be discussed and absorbed in any diversity training program.

Blue Eyed
Essential Blue Eyed
Stolen Eye

Producers: Claus Strigel, Bertram Verhaag
Director: Bertram Verhaag
1996, revised 2003
Closed Captioned

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