Divided by Gender: An Interview with Jane Elliott

Abstract

On the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa felt impelled to give her students a visceral experience of discrimination that they would never forget. She divided them into two groups and told them one was genetically inferior to the other. The next day, she reversed the hierarchy. It was a powerful exercise the children never forgot, and one which propelled teacher Jane Elliott to national attention. Our editor interviewed Elliott 40 years later, on February 4, 2008, just before the Democratic nomination process, on the topic of “Hate and Gender.”

Keywords

• discrimination
• hate
• gender