PBS series investigates myth, reality of race

LOS ANGELES -- Look at your skin color. Now try to see its significance as a mere pigment of our collective imagination.

PBS' "Race: The Power of an Illusion" asks viewers to reconsider our widely shared belief in race as a legitimate means of sorting the human species.

Using science and an examination of the political and social development of America, the documentary makes the case for accepting race as an artificial distinction.

Biological anthropologist Alan Goodman says in the film that seeing people understand race as a "biological myth" is like "seeing what it must have been like to understand that the world isn't flat."

He is among the distinguished voices -- including paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his last interviews before his death in 2002 -- who provide a chorus of support and scientific explanation for dismissing race as a genetic reality.

But the three-part documentary is even more demanding: While "race" represents nothing more than skin-deep characteristics, it argues, it's impossible to ignore because of our protracted, insistent emphasis on it and the result.

"We wanted to give people something to chew on," Larry Adelman, the film's creator and executive producer, said in an interview. "We thought our job was to shake people up, to get them to think twice about that which they've long taken for granted."

CCH Pounder ("The Shield") is the effective narrator of the film, which airs three consecutive weeks. WIU/WUSI Channel 8 will air the first episode, "The Difference Between Us," at 4 a.m. Sunday and a 9 p.m. Tuesday. "The Story We Tell," the second episode, will air at 4 a.m. May 4 and at 9 p.m. May 6. The series will conclude with "The House We Live In," to be broadcast at 4 a.m. May 11 and 9 p.m. May 13.

The documentary was produced by California Newsreel, a nonprofit documentary production and distribution center. The 35-year-old organization, with a comprehensive collection of films on black life, was in a unique position to see which topics had gone unaddressed, said Adelman, its co-director.

"What we realized is that for all this country's concern about race, nobody could agree on what it was," he said. "We thought it was important to go back to first principles, to ask that question that is so basic, so fundamental, 'What is this thing called race?'

"That's the real subject of the film, to address the often unspoken assumptions that all of us carry about race."

Assumptions that survive, Adelman said, despite the fact that the American Anthropological Association, the New England Journal of Medicine and other groups have taken explicit policy positions that race has no basis in biology: There are no genes that distinguish all members of one race from all members of another race.

The film's first hour, "The Difference Between Us," addresses commonly held attitudes and their roots.

We watch as a group of high school students test their DNA and their expectation that they will prove similar to students with shared ancestry.

The documentary recounts the longtime search for racial differences in a bid to prove that one group is superior to another, along with the warp and woof of racial stereotypes.

Attempts to codify racial differences carried a false patina of science, the film says.

"Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro," a paper by Prudential Insurance statistician Frederick L. Hoffman, found that programs to improve the health and welfare of blacks were futile because they were an inherently weak people. He predicted their eventual extinction.

The highly influential paper was published in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court legalized segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), the film notes, drawing a critical connection between social dogma and policy.

In the documentary's second hour, "The Story We Tell," the establishment of slavery in the Americas and a new and growing assertion of white supremacy is traced.

Thomas Jefferson was among the first prominent Americans to publicly offer such a view, writing in 1781 of "a suspicion only" that blacks are inferior in body and mind. The position was intertwined with the need to reconcile a democratic society with an economic reliance on slavery, the film says.

The final chapter, "The House We Live In," covers more familiar ground as it casts a sharp eye on how public policies and institutions have reinforced racial distinctions. Employment, housing and education for nonwhite Americans has been influenced throughout the 20th century -- and, most importantly, into the 21st, the documentary argues.

The average black family today has one-eighth the net worth or assets of the average white family, according to sociologist Dalton Conley.

The advantage of whiteness remains potent in American society and cannot be ignored, the documentary argues.

It's an argument that, even now, is being confronted at the highest level: The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing a pair of cases that will govern how or whether universities may consider an applicant's race, and the ruling is expected to have a broad impact.

But when it comes to the quest for equality, everyone has the opportunity to weigh in, according to at least one hopeful voice.

"Race is a human invention," science historian Evelynn Hammonds says in the film. "We created it, we have used in it ways that have been, in many, many respects, quite negative and quite harmful. And we can think ourselves out of it. We made it; we can unmake it."

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On the Net:

http://www.pbs.org/race

California Newsreel: www.newsreel.org