Blue Eyes

 So, in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.                     Galatians 3:26-28

There was a controversial social experiment done by a teacher named Jane Elliott in 1968 with her third-grade students. In the aftermath of the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she wanted her students to understand in a very practical way what racism, exclusion and prejudice feels like.

She divided her students into two groups- blue eyed kids and brown eyed kids. She later stated that one of the reasons she used this arbitrary determinant was that in Nazi camps during the holocaust in World War II, eye color sometimes decided who went to the gas chamber and who was spared. Blue eyed persons were not likely to be Jewish, but some brown eyed people tried to pass as non-Jews. Often, blue-eyed persons were spared.

She divided the students into eye color groups and proceeded to tell them that children with blue eyes were inherently superior to brown eyed children. She then gave some favored treatment to blue eyed children, including extra recess time. If children with brown eyes made a mistake, she would call it out, and attribute it to the fact that they had brown eyes and were thus inferior. The children also were instructed to wear arm bands indicating their eye color so as to make the distinction clear to all. This too harkened back to the Nazi practice of having Jewish people wear armbands with the Star of David to rapidly indicate who was the shamed group in the country.   

The children quickly picked up on this, and began to become very clannish within their eye color group, and to see themselves as inferior, or superior according to the arbitrary eye color distinction. Fights broke out, and each group began to take on the role of superior or inferior, to the detriment of both groups.

The sad point of this experiment was this- we can easily fall into a tribal and exclusionary mindset. We identify with those most like us, and we exclude and marginalize those that are different.

In looking back at our immigration policies over the past 150 years, some groups, at various times, have been favored, and others have been excluded. That is just one example of how we separate ourselves into little clans and tribes, and how we try to exclude others.

Paul weighed in on this in an early letter to the Galatians as quoted above. His letter rings as true today as it did many centuries ago. Human nature has not changed, only the nature of God can prevail in our broken world.

Prayer: Lord, help us to remember who we are- all equal in your eyes, Amen