Do you remember that Iowa elementary teacher who strayed from the path for her lesson plans in 1968? At the time, Jane Elliott worked for a school in Riceville when she watched news coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assasination. Years later, my class watched video footage of the experiment she introduced to her third graders: “In what is now known as the “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” exercise, she split up her class into two groups based on an arbitrary characteristic: eye color. Those with blue eyes were better, smarter and superior to those with brown eyes, she told her students, and therefore they were entitled to perks, like more recess time and access to the water fountain. … The next day, she reversed the roles. Now the brown-eyed students were superior and had perks and the blue-eyed students were inferior,” the New York Times reports. Elliott sat down with the Times this week to talk about what has yet to change in the U.S.