The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes workshop gets under your skin

As a participant in Blue Eyes Brown Eyes, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I had heard descriptions such as “You have to experience this, you can’t put it into words” or “Indescribable. Not necessarily in a positive way”. That grabbed me and I wanted to know what it was all about. All I knew was that it was a workshop that dealt intensively with discrimination. I didn’t expect how intense it would turn out in the end.  


The workshop is an experience that leaves no participant untouched. The topic of discrimination is conveyed in a very emotionally gripping and targeted way. The concept is based on a famous experiment by elementary school teacher Jane Elliott in 1968.  

The origins of the experiment 

Jane Elliot developed the experiment to help her students understand the effects of racism, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King. She wondered how she was supposed to make her class understand that people are shot because of external characteristics. For the experiment, she divided her class into two groups according to the color of their eyes and arbitrarily assigned different roles to these groups: The blue-eyed were given preferential treatment, while the brown-eyed were discriminated against. The immediate reactions of the students showed profound effects of this arbitrary separation.

The workshop

This is how you can describe what happens on the workshop day. People are arbitrarily treated differently. This alone makes you feel connected to certain people, you automatically take on a role without realizing it. The day is marked by privilege, injustice, unpredictability and great emotions. Just like our daily lives. A large part of the participants was thrown off track. The speed with which you chase from one event to the next, the discrimination that you see at any time and yet cannot avert, the stomach that tightens and you feel like you can’t find a way out. Although we are only talking about one day, this workshop has been formative for the emotional balance of the participants, which is revealed by a discussion afterwards and another round weeks later.  

Seyda Buurman-Kutsal, organizational development trainer with a focus on diversity and inclusion, leads the workshop with her team of experienced trainers. She guides the participants through the difficult topic on this day and creates a safe environment in which we can speak freely and learn. Her special manner is definitely a big success factor of this day. 

The workshop is deliberately designed to provide sufficient space for questions and exchange. The experience wants to be processed, the participants use the time to reflect on the events and analyze their own behavior. What gripped me most was the realization that we are talking about everyday discrimination, which takes place frequently in front of all our eyes and we often no longer even perceive it as such. Every day, people are discriminated because of their various characteristics: too small, too thin, too old, too inexperienced, too dark, too short, too female, and so on…. 

Reflection

Discrimination occurs on many dimensions. Starting with personality traits to characteristics such as gender, sexual orientation or skin color. Appearance, marital status or simple habits are often enough to show people that they are not ‘equal’. Equal to what or to whom? Who sets this norm in our lives that we use as a guide? What is normal?  

Life is colorful and diverse and that’s exactly what makes it special! This workshop has power. It clearly shows us how much discrimination is invisible, even though it happens before our eyes. The participants are challenged and pushed to their limits. At the same time, it is an inspiration to actively want to change something and to oppose the many inequalities. And yet it helps to find your way forward step by step, because even if we want to, we can’t change the world overnight. Just start, even small steps count. 


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