“Seems when we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us,” one girl said. “The way you’re treated you felt like you didn’t want to try to do anything,” said another. Classroom performance fell for both groups of students during the few hours that they were relegated to the subordinate caste. The brown-eyed students took twice as long to finish a phonics exercise the day that they were made to feel inferior. “I watched my students become what I told them they were,” she told NBC News decades later.
