Pages

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

PBS Documentary Shows America in Denial About Racism (Listen)

*A provocative PBS documentary, “American Denial,” examines racism partly through the prism of Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 groundbreaking research of Jim Crow racism in the Deep South to show that despite electing Barack Obama as the first African American president we are far from having a post-racial society in the U.S.

“We are still haunted by our own biases,” Lou Smith the Producer and Director of the documentary said.

Myrdal and African American political scientist Ralph Bunche began in 1938 traveling extensively throughout the South and released in 1944 a 1,483-page study on race called “An American Dilemma” that sought to explain what they called the “Negro Problem.” The two who would later become Nobel Peace Prize winners concluded in their research that it was not the Negro causing the problem of racial problems. They discovered many white people in America had their head in the sand about being responsible for racial bias. This film shows a similarity in America exists today. READ MORE (watch the videos too)

No comments: