Jane Elliott: The Angry Eye, 2001
For those in the mood for a lecture, “The Angry Eye” provides stiff medicine on the psychological assumptions girding racist attitudes and behavior. This is essentially a video recording (shot at Bard College) of teacher Jane Elliott’s group exercise pitting one group of students, known as “Brown Eyes,” against another lowlier group, the “Blue Eyes,” and what happens when the Blue Eyes are ground down relentlessly via small humiliations. This is what black folk have felt for generations, Elliott argues, and with a method nearing the sadomasochistic edge of psycho-theater, she drills her point home. Docu appears designed for classroom broadcasts, but could go public with PBS.
“I’m your resident bitch today,” Elliott tells her largely Anglo class of volunteers, and she explains that her method is based on the notion that “white people are free to be ignorant of how it feels to be discriminated against.” Curiously, she selects mostly women in Blue Eyes as targets of racism, raising unexamined issues of how women also face daily, casual discrimination. Elliott’s ideas hold, even if it’s not hard to root for the few class rebels who revolt against her browbeating.
