pbs | Follow the story of Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal whose landmark 1944 study, An American Dilemma,
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’s systems and institutions today.
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 “shocked to the core by
all the evils [he] saw.” 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.
An American Dilemma
challenged the veracity of the American creed of equality, justice, and
liberty for all. It argued that critically implicit in that creed —
which Myrdal called America’s “state religion” — 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’s
first black president?
American Denial 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 ‘30s and
‘40s, as well as research footage, websites, and YouTube films showing
psychological testing of racial attitudes. Exploring “stop-and-frisk”
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.
