Elliot's Microcosm Summary

In the video, Elliot created a microcosm of society in her classroom and discovered how innocent young children could turn into “nasty, viscous discriminating little third graders” within a day just by the imposition of a discriminating factor: The colour of ones’ eyes.
How could such a small factor make such a huge impact? As Beverly Tatum (1997) pointed out, our concept of identity is shaped by the world around us and the parts of our identity that we focus our attention the most tends to be what gets reflected back on us, often drawn to our targeted identity while our dominant identities go unexamined. So while the whole class consisted of Caucasian children who were perfectly fine with each other a day before, now their common identities were forgotten and the children’s
The dominant also undergoes a change of attitude and begins to feel empowerment and shows a lack of empathy. The dominant blue-eyed also begins to see the subordinates brown-eyed as the ‘others’ who needs to be put in place instead of as their classmates like when Ms Elliot was looking for her yardstick, a blue-eyed student suggested to keep the yardstick on her desk “just in case the brown-eyed people get out of hand!” This was similar to how Richard Wright describes how a subordinate Black would be brutalized by the dominant Whites if he did not “stay in his place” (as cited in Tatum, 1997, p.25)
Miller (1976) points out that those in the dominant groups generally do not like to be reminded of the existence of inequality and do not really understand the experiences of the subordinate. As you would observe, on the second day, Russell was beaming with pride for having blue eyes that he chose not to wear his spectacle to school. Had he really understood how the brown-eyed students were feeling and if he still was fully conscious of the fact that this was but an experiment, he would have downplayed the feature that made him part of the dominant