'No blondes allowed': 50 years after a junior high experiment, students say it had 'a big impact'

[IronLionZion]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/12/30/no-blondes-allowed-years-after-controversial-experiment-students-say-it-had-big-impact/



Blond eighth-grader Jan Shipe Brown remembers getting off the school bus at her junior high school in Potomac, Md., on Feb. 17, 1969 — the start of National Brotherhood Week.

As she walked to the building in her matching turquoise sweater and skirt, she saw the first of many signs of bias. “Blondes use the side door,” read a sign hung over the main entrance. Dark-haired student guards blocked those doors to make sure blond students didn’t use them. After entering through the side entrance, she saw a giant “No Blondes Allowed,” banner strung across the staircase leading to her home room. Hall monitors jeered at her, directing her to the blonds-only stairwell. In class, her teachers didn’t call on her. At lunch, she was forced to sit at a separate table from her brunette friends, segregated based on the color of her hair.

“I have never forgotten that week, it was a seminal event in my life,” Brown said recently in a phone interview.

Brown and her fellow students at Cabin John Junior High were participating in an experiment with prejudice, a program so controversial that parents protested against it and national news media covered it. From Philadelphia to San Mateo, Calif., newspapers reported on the exercise — even Walter Cronkite devoted a segment to it on the “CBS Evening News.”

Tom Warren, Cabin John’s principal, conceived of the idea of turning Brotherhood Week, an official nationwide observance of tolerance that started in the 1930s, into a lesson on the development and spread of prejudice. But instead of discriminating against the handful of black children in the school, they would make a point by targeting blond students.

By creating a reproduction of the national struggle on race relations, the experiment illustrated contentious issues of the day: Is prejudice just a Southern problem? Can you teach children to be prejudiced or to resist prejudice? Issues that, 50 years after the experiment, are still part of the national dialogue on race today.

Damn. That's one way to learn about the American experience that the students will never forget. People get woke to a problem when it happens to them. It should be noted that the experiment lasted only 3 days because it was too much for the community to handle. This also happened 2 years before TC Williams high school across the river (Remember The Titans movie) integrated in 1971.

We need more experiments like this. Oprah did this in 1992

[abqtommy]

1. I've read about similar psychological experiements. I think education has to be one of the main

approaches to creating kinder, gentler people.

[stopdiggin]

7. we're going to need all the help that psychology, sociology

and other various social science disciplines can offer us .. as we head into a world of more and more humans. And we'd better start listening to what they have to tell us. Tribal structure (the fallback human condition) simply isn't going to cut it with 9 billion people .. and the fundamental survival of those billions more and more predicated on interdependence.

We are really going to have to dig down into the fundamental mechanisms of coalitions and cooperation, and how to make these things come together and work for us if we intend to survive as a species.

[marble falls]

2. Interesting stuff. I wonder if any haters might be turned around ...

if there were programs like this in every school.

I know empathy can be changed and the key is allowing people to see with other peoples eyes.

[live love laugh]

3. They could not take for 3 days what many face for a lifetime. nt

[murielm99]

4. Jane Elliott conducted the

Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes experiment with Iowa third graders fifty years ago. I learned about it in several of my education classes and saw a video.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

[BigmanPigman]

5. Very interesting and informative social experiments.

I would like to see this getting more attention in today's society and across the country. It needs to be revisited since we are not learning enough to make important and permanent changes happen in America and it is taking too long to make real progress.

[wnylib]

6. The impact would have bern greatest on

blond students, I think. Practical experience as a learning tool.

I wonder if brunettes or red heads got a taste of how smug superiority feels and liked it. Also wonder if kids who were not blond discovered anything about themselves, e.g. did they experience fear of protesting the injustice? Discover how easy it is to go with the status quo, justify it, so long ss it did not directly affect them?

Would like to see some more complete studies of the after effects on all the students.

[IronLionZion]

9. Some of them bought into the idea of their own superiority over others

and didn't want to give up that privilege because they liked it. There were kids who got abusive from the power, even physically abusive causing some kids to go home early because they couldn't take it.

The post followed up with students later on to discuss. The people who were bullied shared their stories but the people who did the bullying declined to be interviewed.

The article is a good read. There are also follow up videos on Youtube interviewing people from the Oprah experiment.

[Hoyt]

8. Excellent. "White Only" signs for water fountains and bathrooms and "Only Caucasians Need Apply"

employment ads did it for me.

Oh, and I can't forget the gubnors standing in the doorways to public supported elementary schools, high schools, and colleges -- with angry white parent's screaming hatred at a few young kids. Always wished some of those angry white folks had been identified and humiliated decades later. But, they probably would have had a lot of support where I live.

Sadly, white wingers are a tough group to crack.

[karynnj]

10. I wonder if anyone has written about the impact on the NON discriminated group

Many speak of how it opened the eyes of the blondes or blue eyed (in the Iowa case). What I wonder is did any of the privileged kids refuse to bully the other kids. There might be as big a value to understanding how to raise kids, who refuse to follow the authority and many of their peers and to be the ones to say, if if they are advantaged, that this is wrong.

I do get that a down side in recognizing those kids (if any) is that it implicitly calls all many kids who did what they were told. Thinking about this when I first read about this experiment, made me consider that it might not be a good thing to do. Unless the privileged kids learn that their actions were wrong, the only people who rethink their behavior are the "victims". The lack of anyone questioning the actions they were willing to take - pushed by the authority figure - could they assume that they did nothing wrong.

I would imagine that many kids, who perceive themselves as "good kids" who follow the rules, would be startled if their behavior were questioned. In some ways, it could teach that they need an internal moral compass rather than following the rules the authority dictates.

[IronLionZion]

11. The article describes some bought into the idea of privilege and superiority

and some enforcers got physically abusive to their classmates. They didn't want to lose their privilege. A little bit of power can turn normal seeming people into monsters.

[karynnj]

12. THAT was what I was referring to

I assume that the worst kids were possibly bullies anyway, but what of the kids who normally would not have done anything like that ONLY because it was against the rules? How do they personally deal with seeing a bad side of themselves? Could this be a relatively non consequential way to wake up essentially good kids to realize that they need to have their own values and follow them?

[IronLionZion]

17. For a study on bullying, check out the Stanford Prison Experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

Instead of race, they assigned some students to be prisoners and others to be guards. They were all mostly middle class white males.

[karynnj]

18. Thanks, I will look at this later

[Renew Deal]

13. Thanks for sharing

I love the Oprah video. Especially the lady railing about “these people.” lol

[Calista241]

14. The Oprah video is fascinating.

[Kashkakat v.2.0]

15. Hmmm, I think the brown eyes/blue eyes version of this (Jane Elliot) was better cos the roles were

switched after a period of time so that kids could experience both. Seems to me that would give them a better understanding

[RobinA]

16. It Strikes Me

That a version of this takes place in every classroom, only with less obvious differences between the favored and less favored. I was never a teacher’s pet, but it became clear to me that some kids just got better grades on papers, etc. This was borne out in college when we were doing a group project and we discovered that each of our three group members had done the paper that another member was supposed to do. So we switched papers by putting our name on the paper we were supposed to have done, not the one we actually did. Not surprisingly, we each got the grade we always got from that professor. So my paper turned in with another group member's name on it got her usual A. Her paper with my name on it got my usual B-. Learned a lot in that class!