| Race: The Power of an Illusion | |
| Director: | Christine Herbes-Sommers, Tracy Heather Strain, Llewellyn Smith |
| Producer: | Larry Adelman for California Newsreel |
| Distributor: | California Newsreel |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
Race: The Power of an Illusion is a three-part documentary series produced by California Newsreel that investigates the idea of race in society, science and history. The educational documentary originally screened on American public television and was primarily funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation and PBS.
This three-hour documentary challenges the idea of race as biology and traces our current notions to the 19th century. It also demonstrates how race nevertheless has a continuing impact through institutions and social policies.
Examines the contemporary science - including genetics - that challenges our common-sense assumptions that human beings can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.
Uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th-century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the Western imagination. The episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as "natural."
Asks, if race is not biology, what is it? This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics and culture. It reveals how our social institutions "make" race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.