Jane Elliot, renowned race-relations expert known for her “blue eyes/brown eyes” experiments and a frequent guest of national talk shows, recently brought her high-energy racism demonstration to Iowa State.

Elliot first performed her experiment on her all-white Riceville, Iowa, third-grade class after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. In the experiment, Elliot divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups.

On the first day of the experiment, she treated one group of the students badly and instructed the “dominant” group of students to discriminate against them.

Elliot learned from her experiment that there are clearly many things wrong with how we are raising our children. She learned that America is drowning in its own prejudice and we need to save it.

While Elliot did not perform the experiment Thursday, she still captivated the more than 650 people that showed up to listen to her lecture on America’s racism and sexism problems.

She was right on target by saying people need to recognize the differences among people, but they shouldn’t discriminate against people because of their differences.

We agree with her claim that racism could be stopped in one generation if people would stop teaching their children to be racist. All it takes is one generation to start the cycle. But if it is to happen, someone has to start the cycle. We must become leaders, and begin making the changes that will take us into the next century.

There will always be people out there like that crazy guy in the movie “Higher Learning” who are just followers. We must try and educate these people the right way before they learn the wrong way.

Racism is alive and well in America, but only we can kill it once and for all.