Follow the story of Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal whose landmark 1944 study, An American Dilemma<\/i>, probed deep into the United States’ racial psyche. The film weaves a narrative that exposes some of the potential underlying causes of racial biases still rooted in America\u2019s systems and institutions today.<\/p>\n
An intellectual social visionary who later won a Nobel Prize in economics, Myrdal first visited the Jim Crow South at the invitation of the Carnegie Corporation in 1938, where he was \u201cshocked to the core by all the evils [he] saw.\u201d With a team of scholars that included black political scientist Ralph Bunche, Myrdal wrote his massive 1,500-page investigation of race, now considered a classic.<\/p>\n
An American Dilemma<\/i> challenged the veracity of the American creed of equality, justice, and liberty for all. It argued that critically implicit in that creed \u2014 which Myrdal called America\u2019s \u201cstate religion\u201d \u2014 was a more shameful conflict: white Americans explained away the lack of opportunity for blacks by labeling them inferior. Myrdal argued that this view justified practices and policies that openly undermined and oppressed the lives of black citizens. Seventy years later, are we still a society living in this state of denial, in an era marked by the election of the nation\u2019s first black president?<\/p>\n
American Denial<\/i> sheds light on the unconscious political and moral world of modern Americans, using archival footage, newsreels, nightly news reports, and rare southern home movies from the \u201830s and \u201840s, as well as research footage, websites, and YouTube films showing psychological testing of racial attitudes. Exploring \u201cstop-and-frisk\u201d practices, the incarceration crisis, and racially-patterned poverty, the film features a wide array of historians, psychologists, and sociologists who offer expert insight and share their own personal, unsettling stories. The result is a unique and provocative film that challenges our assumptions about who we are and what we really believe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Using the story of Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 investigation of Jim Crow racism as a springboard, American Denial<\/i> explores the power of unconscious biases and how the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice still impact notions of race and class today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":8291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1264,1226],"class_list":["post-306","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-race-ethnicity","topic-social-justice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n