In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott divided her class in Riceville, Iowa by eye color. Blue-eyed children were told they were smarter and more capable; brown-eyed children were made to wear collars and sit at the back. The next day, Elliott reversed the roles, and the film shows how quickly the newly "superior" group turned on their classmates, with grades and behavior shifting along with the exercise. This Frontline production revisits the experiment fourteen years later, reuniting Elliott with her former students, now adults, who describe how the exercise reshaped their views on race and prejudice. Archival classroom footage from the original exercise is intercut with a reunion session where Elliott runs a version of the exercise again, this time with adult corrections officers, to show that the reaction to arbitrary discrimination does not change with age. The film's plainest lesson is also its most uncomfortable one: prejudice can be manufactured in a single afternoon.