It begins with Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and his fascination with American values. Long have Americans prided themselves on freedom and equality and, as Myrdal learned in his research, long have they failed to reconcile those guiding principles with racial disparities that (in many ways) persist to this day. It begins with Gunnar Myrdal, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg in America’s glacial civil rights progress.
Llewellyn Smith’s Independent Lens documentary American Denial premieres on PBS on Monday, Feb 23 and Madison’s “Community Cinema” program will present an advance preview of the film this Thursday, Feb 12 in the Central Library. Starting a conversation about the systemic subjugation of black Americans with a white guy seems ill-considered but Myrdal’s confrontation of racial equality crystallizes into a complicated love for his adopted nation and a clinical, objective look at its deep-seated issues.
These inequalities, American Denial argues, are seen in disproportionate incarceration rates and racial profiling and as cited in a number of psychological studies, cultural values and indoctrination. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s infamous “doll study” in the 1940s found that children will overwhelmingly associate goodness with lighter skin and badness with those of color. To the point, Smith confronts and draws out these studies head on, studies made all the more uncomfortable when juxtaposed with a repeat experiment’s similar results almost 60 years later. In the wake of current events in Ferguson, New York City and Milwaukee, he criminal justice system seems to have merely reaffirmed for many America’s longstanding institutional failures; it’s American Denial‘s rigorous scientific approach — re-examining studies or analogizing Jim Crow laws with European antisemitism — that feel like intellectual inroads.
It can also feel scattered. American Denial bounces between snapshots of Brown v. Board of Education, talking head sociologists, and Myrdal’s own personal life, replete with its own hypocrisies and conflicts. Smith relies on static photographs for re-enactments, which are stylistically at odds with the film’s animations and archival footage and yet a fitting distillation of arrested progress. It’s messy but so is its subject.
At 53 minutes, Independent Lens’ latest documentary fits rank and file with past entries, designed for one-hour public television programming blocks and in the case of the Public Library’s event this Thursday, primed for a post-screening discussion. Indeed, “Community Cinema” will host a forum afterwards featuring Rev. Dr. Alex Gee, Jr. and UW-Madison history and politics Professor Stephen Kantrowski.
- “Community Cinema” presents American Denial this Thursday at 6:30p in Rm 302 of the Central Madison Library. Admission is FREE and open to the public. A trailer is embedded below: