On TV: AMERICAN DENIAL

Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens this coming Monday, February 23: AMERICAN DENIAL

Llewellyn Smith’s exploration of the US’s historical and current problems with race makes its debut on the Emmy Award-winning public television series. It is also being shown at community screenings around the country.

Smith’s wide-ranging profile on American attitudes to race centers on the work of Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, who was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation to conduct an impartial, outsider’s study on race relations in 1938. Visiting the Deep South, then fully under Jim Crow, and adopting a curious naïveté, Myrdal elicited the true opinions of white residents on the so-called “Negro problem,” which he essentially recouched as white prejudice. The researcher ultimately released his findings in a landmark book, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND MODERN DEMOCRACY, which identified a provocative cognitive dissonance between what he referred to as the “American Creed” – the democratic principle of equality and opportunity that shapes the nation’s identity – and a deep-seated white prejudice which seeks to limit the political, social, and economic status of non-whites. Smith threads Myrdal’s story through the film, while also applying its conclusions to later studies – such as psychological tests that reveal lingering, unconscious bias against blacks in both white and black subjects – and in present-day systems of power, most notably the cumulative effect of racial profiling and mass incarceration on generations of black men’s sense of self and self-worth. The film tackles a bit too much for its hour running time – for example, unnecessarily delving into Myrdal’s personal issues with his research partner and wife, even given their tangential, thematic parallels to his research – and intermittently employs an irksome series of staged still re-enactments, but is better served by its use of creative illustrations and footage of psychological experiments with young African-American children. Belying wishful thinking that American society has reached a colorblind, post-racial state, the thought-provoking film instead challenges viewers to acknowledge the powerful role denial plays in the disjunction between our principles and our actions, in both our individual and systemic approaches to race.