By Chandra Thomas Whitfield
At first glance Jane Elliott is all grandma: There’s the crown of fuzzy white hair, the wire-framed spectacles, the deliberate but steady gait, and the wisdom lines that punctuate her alabaster face.
But step inside her cozy, sun-drenched home in a gated senior community near Sun City, California — likely one of the whitest zip codes in America — and she shatters all senior citizen stereotypes. It’s probably safe to assume that not many 80-something, white women from Iowa can say they’ve made a “cameo appearance” in a rap music video (she’s a “real life American hero,” Grammy winner T.I. has said), and even fellow Atlanta MC Killer Mike has gushed over meeting her.
The titles in her bookcase, situated along a far wall in her homey living room, may hint to why they find her so fascinating: “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander; “White Awareness” by Judy H. Katz; “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America” by John McWhorter; “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” by David Brock; and most importantly — in her eyes, at least — “The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea” by Robert Wald Sussman.
Adding to her mystique is that Elliott doesn’t mince words or put much effort into suppressing her opinions — especially when it comes to the current presidential administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is, in her words, merely “a loyal acolyte” of the president who “voices the same lies and deceptions that Trump does.”
His track record of doing so, she insisted, makes him “hardly the best person to deal with criminal justice.” As for the Donald, she’s got even fewer nice things to say, asserting that the “reckless and bigoted remarks” he and his supporters have made have forced America to take “drastic steps backward after only seven months” into his term.
Her perspective is not surprising considering that for nearly a half-century she has reigned as one of the most outspoken social commentators and well-known race scholars on the planet. Somehow she manages to speak as passionately and candidly about America’s deep-seeded racial problems today as she did 49 years ago when her unconventional and controversial racism “exercise” catapulted her into the national spotlight.
“I created a microcosm of society in my third-grade classroom on April 5, 1968,” she said, speaking of the iconic day, the day after the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, when she was inspired to create what would become known as her famed “Blue-Eyes/Brown-Eyes Exercise.”
Her life’s work landed her on “Oprah” five times, inspired more than a handful of documentaries and has been credited as the impetus for the “diversity training” that many corporations and educational institutions still host for their employees today.
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