MIXED MEDIA
PBS film puts myth, reality of race under the microscope

Physical anthropologist William Montague Cobb taught methods of anatomical comparison. Cobb's analyses of Jesse Owens and other 1936 Olympic athletes showed that there were no fundamental differences in bone structure between white and black athletes. Howard University via PBS

By Lynn Elber
Associated Press

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

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's among the distinguished voices — including that of 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. "We thought our job was to shake people up, to get them to think twice about that which they've long taken for granted."

"What we realized is that for all this country's concern about race, nobody could agree on what it was," said Adelman, its co-director. "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.

There is a minority opinion that continues to describe race as genetic but that disregards science, Adelman said. He said he did not feel compelled to turn the film into a "survey course" including those dissenters.

Looking at stereotypes

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

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.

As poverty and social neglect contributed to high infant mortality rates and illness for some black Americans in the 19th century, for example, it was concluded that blacks were physically inferior to whites — a startling contrast to later assertions that blacks were stronger and more athletically advanced than whites.

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.

"And the way you do that is to say, 'Yeah, but you know, there is something different about these people. This whole business of inalienable rights, ah, that's fine, but it only applies to certain people,' " historian James Horton says.

Institutional bias studied

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 have 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.

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."