Eyes Project: Unveiling Discrimination's Impact on Young Minds

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Eyes project faced the important issue of discrimination by teaching young children the effects it has on people. I learned that something as insignificant as the color of people’s eyes can be used to make them feel inferior to others. It proved to viewers the ultimate power that prejudice and racism wield. I think that I will remember the scene when the friends were reunited after being separated due to the color of their eyes. The children were ecstatic that the color of their eyes no longer served as a boundary between their friendships, which was a powerful scene to witness.

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I will probably remember the scenes where the children began to believe the discrimination that they were experiencing and conformed to their stereotypes. I found these scenes interesting because they showed that the way they were treated affected how they behaved and the way that they viewed themselves. After being told that brown-eyed people were dumber and lower in status than blue-eyed people, the brown-eyed children started to behave as though they were less intelligent and their school work was negatively affected.

I think that this exercise overall accurately responded to the question, “Why would anyone want to murder Martin Luther King?”. After the teacher told the blue-eyed kids that they were superior to brown-eyed kids, they immediately adopted the attitude. This instantly caused violence among the students.

It promoted hostility between the “social classes”, which leads directly back to their initial question. I feel like the question was answered more effectively by providing a real-world example instead of just talking to the students.

Elliot labeled brown-eyed students as vacuous and wouldn’t allow them the same privileges as the blue-eyed students, such as drinking from the water fountain and using the playground equipment. This directly relates to the stereotypes of the way blacks have been treated. They weren’t allowed to use most public facilities or share the privileges that were bestowed upon white individuals. The teacher tried to use basic examples of real stereotypes to explain discrimination to the children. Overall, I think that this exercise should be done with all children globally. It seemed to impact the students by putting them in the place of someone experiencing racism. It was an excellent idea to try this exercise on children that hadn’t fully developed an opinion on racism, because it was able to lay the foundation for them for the future on how to treat others. The exercise taught this message better than any other method could have because the children had to feel racism for themselves so they would know the effects of their actions upon others.