The Power Of An Illusion, California Newsreel And Its Co...

In Race: The Power of an Illusion, California Newsreel and its co-director Larry Adelman crafted a documentary that is both accessible and sophisticated. Making use of state-of-the-art scientific, historical, and social-scientific accounts, the series was about the crew being on a detailed tour of a wide range of attitudes and beliefs about race. It exposes the many misconceptions and inadequacies of the common sense views into which we have all been deeply socialized. Most notably, the series explains and uses genetic mapping and recent advances in human genomics to demonstrate the enormous variability within racially defined groups that supposedly share key corporeal characteristics; it links the racialization of U.S. society to the historical processes that created modern North America—colonization and settlement, slavery, migration, etc.; and it explores and analyzes the reproduction of racial inequality, as well as concepts of racial difference, in the recent past and, in deed, in the present. It effectively and accessibly anatomizes racial segregation, stratification, privilege and disadvantage, violence, fear, and guilt in the United States. Episode 1, â€Å"The difference between us† followed a dozen students, including Black athletes and Asian string players, who sequence and compare their own DNA to see who is more genetically similar. The results surprise the students and myself, when they discover their closest genetic matches are as likely to be with people from