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Oprah's controversial 1992 secret racism experiment on her audience is still matters today

People turned on each other quickly.

via BrightBeagles/YouTube

A woman gets angry on an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

On an old episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in July 1992, Oprah put her audience through a social experiment that puts racism in a new light. Despite being over three decades old, it's as relevant today as ever. She split the audience members into two groups based on their eye color. Those with brown eyes were given preferential treatment by getting to cut the line and offered refreshments while they waited to be seated. Those with blue eyes were made to put on a green collar and wait in a crowd for two hours.

Staff were instructed to be extra polite to brown-eyed people and to discriminate against blue-eyed people. Her guest for that day's show was diversity expert Jane Elliott, who helped set up the experiment and played along, explaining that brown-eyed people were smarter than blue-eyed people.

Elliott is an internationally known teacher, lecturer, and diversity trainer who, in 1968, after the assignation of Martin Luther King, Jr., performed the controversial and startling "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise" in her third-grade classroom.

What is the Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes Exercise?

Watch the video to see how this experiment plays out.

oprah, racism, oprah wingrey, blue eyed/brown eye, jane elliott, oprah controversywww.youtube.com


One of the most interesting parts of the video is when, even though the blue- and brown-eyed people were segregated by Oprah's staff, they became angry with one another. One woman with brown eyes began to chastise the blue-eyed people, remembering the blue-eyed friend she had in the past. "I had a girlfriend in school who was blue-eyed," the brown-eyed audience member said. "She was so stupid. She was always copying off of my papers. These people were so rude and so noisy today. We couldn't hear any ourselves, not even talk; it was ridiculous."

From the stage, Eliott, pretending to be a brown-eyed supremacist, sternly talked about how brown-eyed people were superior but were called out for having blue eyes. She defended her position by saying she's learned to act like a brown-eyed person. "I've learned to act brown-eyed. I have a brownie husband and three brown-eyed children," Eliott told the audience. "Why did you get the message in this room is? It's to act brown-eyed, and you, too, can take off your collar. Act intelligently, and you, too, won't need your collar. None of you have acted intelligently yet."


Eventually, the audience realized that the experiment was about race, and Eliott stopped the brown-eyed supremacist posturing and began explaining how this experiment plays out in everyday America, but it's about skin, not eye color. That didn't stop one of the audience members from trotting out an old racist trope. "We can see where this is going. She's saying that everybody has racism in them. It's not really about the eye. She's trying to teach about racism," the male audience member said. "But she can't get away from the fact that God created the races, and you are going to be different. You can't help it."

Elliott had the perfect retort to the man who claimed that racism was divinely internet: "God created one race, the human race, and human beings created racism."

Watch the entire segment here:


- YouTubewww.youtube.com


This article originally appeared six years ago.

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Princess Diana said strong women are seen as a threat. Meghan and Oprah prove they are.

Ava DuVerney/Twitter, @theMoneyCoach/Twitter (CBS)

Like millions of others, I tuned in last night to watch Oprah Winfrey's interview with (former) Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Although watching "The Crown" has admittedly piqued my curiosity about the Royal Family, I've never had any particular interest in following the drama in real life. As inconsequential as the un-royaling of Harry and Meghan is to me personally, it's a historically and socially significant development.

The story touches so many hot buttons at once—power, wealth, tradition, sexism, racism, colonialism, family drama, freedom, security, and the media. But as I sat and watched the first hour of just Oprah and Meghan Markle talking, I was struck by the simple significance of what I was seeing.

Here were two Black women, one who had battled sexism and racism in her industry and broke countless barriers to create her own empire, and one who has battled racism and sexism to protect her babies, whose royal lineage can be traced back through 1,200 years of rule over the British Empire. And the conversation these women were having had the power to take down—or at least do real damage to—one of the longest-standing monarchies in the world.

Whoa.

It's not that I have some desire to take down the Queen—both Harry and Meghan were very clear that Queen Elizabeth has been good to them—but the institution of the monarchy and the various branches of that institution are steeped in colonialism, racism, and sexism that has long been glossed over in the name of reverence and respect for royalty. What force could possibly make a dent in such an institution?

Apparently, Meghan Markle. But she's not doing it alone.

As Oprah asked her about the things we're all curious about, I thought with awe about the generations of Black women who had fought and endured in order for these two women to be sitting there, alone in front of the cameras, with the wrapt attention of millions. That history was palpable throughout the interview.



When Harry joined in, backing up what Meghan said and sharing his own perspective as a lifelong member of the Royal Family, another woman entered the picture. One thing that came through most clearly in the joint interview was that Harry is so his mother's son.

Princess Diana rocked the royal boat by not conforming to what the palace wanted her to be when she was married to Prince Charles. She stood up for herself, and though much of the world loved her for it, the hounding of the paparazzi and the lack of support from the Royal Family was incredibly difficult.

"I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path," Diana said. "And I think it's the strength that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong? Where does she get it from? Where is she taking it? Where is she going to use it?"

Diana's butler has pointed out how similar Meghan is to Diana in personality, going so far as to say he thinks the two would have clashed if Diana were still alive because they are both strong, independent women. He said that similarity is what drew Harry to Meghan. And now Harry has given Meghan the support and defense that his mother never got from the Royal Family.

Diana set the stage for that. She left money for each of her sons in her will—despite the fact that they were royals and would financially always be taken care of—which Harry says enabled the couple to pay for security for their family after the Royal Family cut off security following their stepping back from senior Royal Family member duties.

"I think she saw it coming." Harry said. "I certainly felt her presence throughout this whole process."

So we have a strong woman who isn't willing to put up with the constant attacks from the British press, who bravely asked for help when she became suicidal, and who walked away from the bullshit when it became clear that a long-standing institution wasn't going to change.

We have a strong woman who built her own platform and offered this couple the opportunity to share their story on the world stage.

We have a strong woman who raised a son to celebrate strong women and who had the wisdom to prepare him for something she sensed but couldn't exactly foresee.

What I saw in that interview was the power of three women calling one of the most powerful institutions in the world to account, and the entire world listening to them. That's exactly the disruption of the status quo that such institutions have always feared. That's the threat that strong women actually pose. And it's a glorious thing to witness.

The whole interview is worth watching. If you missed it, you can watch the whole thing for free on the CBS website here.

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Oprah nailed why dishonesty has eroded our nation. But she gave us hope too.

Oprah gave a commencement speech at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and her words were everything we need right now.

I don't know how, but Oprah always seems to be able to diagnose what's ailing America and offer us a prescription to dull the pain — one that somehow isn't too hard to swallow.

Am I suggesting she run for president? No. But this speech did a lot to convince me she'd make a pretty kickass leader of the free world.

I'm a middle-aged adult, and I got as much out of this speech as any 20-something did, guaranteed. These are life lessons for us all, young and old, rich and poor, citizen or statesman.

I recommend watching the whole speech, but here are some of the highlights.

Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images.

The bad news and the good news: Everything sucks right now, but we can fix it.

Oprah began by pulling no punches about our current reality.

"Everything around us — including and in particular the internet and social media — is now being used to erode trust in our institutions, interfere in our elections, and wreak havoc on our infrastructure," she said. "It hands advertisers a map to our deepest desires, it enables misinformation to run rampant, attention spans to run short, and false stories from phony sites to run circles around major news outlets."

Welp. That about covers that.

Then she offered up the good news. "The solution is each and every one of you. Because you will become the new editorial gatekeepers, an ambitious army of truth-seekers who will arm yourselves with the intelligence, with the insight and the facts necessary to strike down deceit."

Yes! Yay, real journalism!

Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images.

Then she addressed the way we interact with one another and how we can respond to this moment.

"This is what I know: The problem is everybody is meeting hysteria with more hysteria, and then we just are all becoming hysterical," she said, going on to say we must avoid getting "locked in" to a cycle of trying to resist in ways that don't work.

And how are we supposed to do that, Oprah?

"We're supposed to see through it and then transcend it. That is how you overcome hysteria," she said. "... Use this moment to encourage you, to embolden you, and to literally push you into the rising of your life."

Of course, even Oprah knows that's not always easy.

"I understand how it's so easy to become disillusioned," she said, "so tempting to allow apathy to set in because anxiety is being broadcast on 157 channels, 24 hours a day, all night long. And everybody I know is feeling it."

Nonetheless, she encouraged the audience to remain strong.

"These times are here to let us know that we need to take a stand for our right to have hope, and we need to take a stand with every ounce of wit and courage we can muster."

Finally, she laid down some big truth about truth.

"Here's what you have to do," she said. "You make the choice every day, every single day, to exemplify honesty. Because the truth — let me tell you something about the truth — the truth exonerates and it convicts. It disinfects, and it galvanizes. The truth has always been and will always be our shield against corruption, our shield against greed and despair. The truth is our saving grace."

OMG. I love truth. And I love Oprah. It's basically a tie.

Watch the full speech — seriously, watch it! — below:

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Benedict Cumberbatch has one simple way men can help fix pay inequity.

Doctor Strange is making some really important magic happen in Hollywood.

Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays the Marvel superhero doctor, is getting vocal about equal pay and calling on all men in the industry to make sacrifices when their female counterparts aren't given it.

Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images.

In an interview with Radio Times Magazine on May 13, 2018, he laid out one simple way men can make sure female co-workers behind the scenes are being treated and getting paid equally.

"Equal pay and a place at the table are the central tenets of feminism," he told the magazine. "Look at your quotas. Ask what women are being paid, and say, 'If she's not paid the same as the men, I'm not doing it.'"

The internet was pretty stoked about Cumberbatch's statement.

Cumberbatch is no stranger to standing up for what's right. He's used his platform to speak out against the British government's abuse of civil liberties, went off on world governments for not doing more to help Syrian refugees, and participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) awareness. In short, he's been a bit of a superhero long before his Marvel days.  

Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for BFI.

Given the pervasive pay gap between men and women in Hollywood, Cumberbatch's bold statements are more important than ever.    

Nationwide, women make about $0.85 to a man's dollar. In Hollywood, women are often paid less than their male co-stars evenin cases when a woman plays a leading role.

TV host, actress, and producer Oprah Winfrey spoke eloquently about challenging the status quo in an interview for the Time Firsts project. Winfrey discussed recognizing the pay inequality as she was leading her talkshow, "Oprah." New to the industry herself at the time, she wanted to make sure her employees — many of whom were women trying to find their way in the industry — were being paid equally. She approached a producer who was reluctant about raising salaries for the young women.

"He actually said to me, 'They're only girls. They're a bunch of girls. What do they need more money for?'" she explained.  "I go, 'Well, either they're gonna get raises, or I'm gonna sit down. I will not work unless they get paid.' And so they did."

Cumberbatch's production company, SunnyMarch, is largely run by women and aims to produce and support more female-focused dramas.    

"I'm proud that [partner] Adam [Ackland] and I are the only men in our production company; our next project is a female story with a female lens about motherhood, in a time of environmental disaster," Cumberbatch said. "If it's centered around my name, to get investors, then we can use that attention for a raft of female projects. Half the audience is female!"    

Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images.

As a straight, white actor, Cumberbatch's use of his privilege sets an important example for other actors in similar positions.

To achieve true pay equality in Hollywood, more male actors — particularly those who inherently have more privilege than others — should continue using their platforms and resources to support other women, make public calls for change, and use their networks to push for systematic change. Only then can we make true, systematic change from the ground up.

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