Jane Elliott Unapologetically Puts America on Blast…Again in New Doc

“…most people think of me as that miserable old bi$&#, which stands for Being In Total Control Honey.” are the words of a blunt 90 year old educator who shoots straight from the hip and has an acronym for literally everything.

For more than fifty-five years, Jane Elliott has forced white America to confront truths it still tries to deny. Best known for the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes lesson in discrimination she led the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Elliott has never stopped exposing how power divides, how silence sustains it and how easily “good people” look away. She believes as an educator it is her job to lead people out of ignorance.

Approaching 90, Elliott remains as sharp, candid and relentless as ever. Today, she is on the front lines of the culture wars in Temecula, California, where her great-grandchild attends school and a board seized by white Christian nationalists is banning books, erasing history and fueling a wave of censorship that includes her own lessons. The battles she warned about decades ago are now playing out in real time and she has intention of slowing down. “You can duck and cover or plow through and make a difference,” stated Elliott.

Featuring her students who lived through her early classroom experiments and voices like activist/rapper Killer Mike and historian/activist Ibram X. Kendi, who examine what Elliott’s work has revealed about power, complicity and the urgency of this moment being experienced here in the United States. Needless say those actions are already taking place as witnessed past weekend as Slavery displays in Philadelphia were removed from a historical site.

Jane Elliott Against the World says the quiet part out loud. Elliott states with her whole chest that “racism is a white person problem created by white peopleand it’s not important what they think  – it’s about what they do.” Ultimately, there is no gene for racism, sexism or ageism. As long as prejudice prevails in our society, we will never become a great nation of educators or human beings.  Luckily, we still have Jane Elliott to set us all straight.

Director Judd Ehrlich does an exemplary job of letting us see Jane in the rawest form possibly professionally and personally.  Sometimes, when everyone know your name, your family life suffers in unimaginable ways.  She’s human. Human beings are fallible. In the end, Elliott and Ehrlich teach the globe what an amazing country America could be if would could just do what’s right.