TREATING OTHERS EQUITABLY, NOT EQUALLY

In a perfect world, people of all ages, colors and genders would be treated equitably, not equally. But that's not the world Americans are living in, Jane Elliott said.

Elliott, 62, is the creator of a prejudice-sensitizing activity called, "Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes." She was a featured speaker Tuesday at Southeast Missouri State University. The lecture was part of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. activities at the university.

A Sioux Indian prayer says you should keep from judging a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins, she said.

Then she asked students to judge themselves based on their answers to a series of questions about behaviors based on religious beliefs.

Finally, she asked to stand anyone who wanted to be treated like a person of color is treated today in the United States. No one did.

"Do you know what you've just admitted?" Elliott asked the crowd of 300 people at the University Center Ballroom. "You know it's happening and you don't want it to happen to you."

Elliott decided that her third-grade class in Riceville, Iowa, would learn about discrimination and prejudice following King's assassination in 1968.

Since that day, she's been demonstrating her exercise to national television audiences, corporations and the military.

"I never thought it would get out of my classroom," she said.

One class experiment was even filmed for a Canadian broadcasting company.

"I'm a racist," said Elliot, a small gray-haired woman dressed from head to toe in black. "I will tell you up front. If you look at a white person schooled in the U.S., you are looking at a racist. The only way you could not be is to learn nothing from education because it's perpetuating the myth of white supremacy."

Asking for two volunteers from the crowd, -- a black man and white woman -- Elliott pinpointed differences in the two.

"There's only one race -- the human race," she said. "We are all descendants of the first modern human. Color is not a race.

"We don't need a color-blind society. We need a color-recognizing, color-accepting society. Different is important and valuable. It's what makes this a better place."

Seeing America as a melting pot society is wrong, Elliott said.

"How many times do you make a tossed salad and blend the lettuce, carrots, radishes and make it indistinguishable? You want it to maintain its identity. We are all different on the inside."

During the exercise in her classroom, Elliott said she learned more about power than she'd ever known before.

"I may not change those attitudes, but I can challenge those attitudes," she said. "If you want to be a racist, live those principles."

Racism is a learned behavior, she said. "I thought prejudice caused discrimination. That's not it. Discrimination creates prejudice."

Elliott refused to live the racist principles she learned from her parents. "I refused to accept that bigotry as being right," she said. "They were wrong. And a lot of things we do as parents are wrong."