You are visiting a website from 1996.

The Eye to Eye workshop which the Magenta Foundation uses to combat racism is inspired by a workshop that was developed over 28 years ago in the United States by Jane Elliott. During a day-long workshop people are divided on the basis of an arbitrary physical aspect - eye color. People with brown eyes are declared to be better and more intelligent and are granted privileges, privileges which are denied to the blue-eyed, deemed to be worse, less intelligent and lower qualified. For the first time, many white people become acquainted with the feeling of belonging to a condemned group which can never win. They experience the feeling of being discriminated against, in the same way that society today discriminates against women, people with a different skin color or the disabled. In only 15 minutes, a realistic microcosmos of society today with all its phenomena and feelings is created. As already known from the Milgram experiment, even participants who know the "rules" are unable to remain uninvolved.