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Matters of Race [DVD]
4 hours, 2003
Description: What obligation does a hostpital have to employ people who are the same races as those it serves? How does race shape the response of a small rural town when its population nearly doubles due mainly to immigration from Mexico and Central America? What happens when laws meant to protect the rights of one minority group are used to accuse another of discrimination? What does race mean anyway? Can you be more than one?
Using the personal writings of several leading American authors, and the voices and stories of Americans young and old from New York to Los Angeles, Honolulu, Hawaii to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Matters of Race explores the complex demands of the country's rapidly changing multiracial and multicultural society and shows how American citizens imagine the new America of the 21st century. |
RACE - The Power of an Illusion [Available in VHS & DVD]
56 minutes each Episode, 2003
Description: Race - The Power of an Illusion questions the very idea of race as biology, suggesting that a belief in race is no more sound than believing that the sun revolves around the earth. Yet race still matters. Just because race doesn't exist in biology doesn't mean it isn't very real, helping shape life chances and opportunities.
Episode 1 - The Difference Between Us examines the contemporary science - including genetics - that challenges our common sense assumptions that human beings can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.
Episode 2 - The Story We Tell uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the western imagination. The episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as "natural."
Episode 3 - The House We Live In asks, If race is not biology, what is it? This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics and culture. It reveals how our social institutions "make" race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.
Race - The Power of an Illusion helps set the terms that any further discussion of race must first take into account. Ideal for human biology, anthropology, sociology, American history, American studies, and cultural studies. |
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Skin Deep [VHS]
53 minutes, 1996
Description: Skin Deep chronicles the eye-opening journey of a diverse and divided group of college students as they awkwardly but honestly confront each other's racial prejudices. Issues of self-segregation on campus, feelings of hurt and discrimination, conflicts over affirmative action, and ultimately, students' personal responsibility for making a difference all enter the interracial dialogue. The students eventually learn to hear each other, arrive at new levels of trust and understanding, and take their first tentative steps towards building community.
Skin Deep will trigger thoughtful discussion and encourage students to address the deep-seated barriers to building a campus climate which respects diversity. It is ideal for student development, residential life, counseling, and staff diversity training as well as courses in sociology, psychology, education, and ethnic and multicultural studies.
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Blood in the Face [VHS]
75 minutes, 1991
Description: Allowed access to film national gatherings of U.S. radical right groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus, and the Euro-American Alliance, Blood in the Face straight-forwardly presents the views of people whose avowed goal is to forge a political union which will transform North America into one Aryan nation.
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The Color of Your Skin [VHS]
60 minutes, 1991
Description: Racial strife during the Vietnam War reached a boiling point that was no longer acceptable to the armed forces. The high command determined that soldiers, sailors and airmen must be encouraged to deal with their innermost feelings on the intense and complex issue of race. Frontline goes behind the scenes at the Army's Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute to record a powerful, intimate journey into America's race relations.
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No Time To Lose [VHS]
27 minutes, 1988
Description: No Time To Lose is a New York State Department of Social Services documentary on the plight of poor Black and Hispanic children.
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Black Women of Brazil [VHS]
20 minutes, 1986
Description: Despite official jargon to the contrary, Brazilians live in a racially segregated class system. This upbeat, sensitive and elegantly composed documentary, produced by Lilith Video Collective, examines the ways that black women have coped with racism while validating their lives through their own music and religion. The film celebrates the many faces of black women in Brazil. Grounded in a strong women's movement and acknowledging the influence of mass media images, Lilith has been critically acclaimed for its fast-paced, subjective documentaries.
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Blue Eyed [VHS]
93 minutes, 1995
Description: Blue Eyed offers viewers an opportunity to sit on a full-length workshop with Jane Elliot, whose 1968 experiment in anti-racist training was documented in the ABC News documentary The Eye of the Storm and subsequently revisited by Frontline in A Class Divided. In Blue Eyed, we join a group of 40 teachers, police, school administrators and social workers in Kansas City- blacks, latinos and whites; women and men. The workshop demonstrates that even without judicial discrimination, hate speech, lowered expectations, and dismissive behavior can have devastating effects on individual achievements
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A Class Divided [VHS]
60 minutes, 1985
Description: In 1970, Jane Elliot, a public school teacher in Riceville, Iowa, divided her all white, all Christian third graders into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups for a lesson in discrimination, which was later brought to national attention by the award-winning ABC News documentary, The Eye of the Storm. On successive days, each group was treated as "inferior" and subjected to discriminatory treatment by their "superior" classmates and the teacher herself. Even with the knowledge that this was an exercise, the lesson was experienced by the nine- and ten-year-old students in both groups as real. A Class Divided updates that unique lesson by blending film footage from the original Frontline documentary with a reunion of the students and their teacher fifteen years later. The students, now young adults, relate the profound and enduring effects that the discrimination lesson had upon their lives, particularly in their early experiences as parents. Jane Elliot is also filmed giving this same jarring lesson to adult employees of the Iowa prison system, with results that are strikingly similar to those experienced with the children.
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Coffee Colored Children [VHS]
15 minutes, 1988
Description: In this unsettling lyrical film, the narrator recalls the pain of a childhood spent growing up in an all-white neighborhood. With a white mother and an absent black father, the family suffered from racial harassment, once quite dramatically when a neo-Nazi youth defiled their front door. The self-hatred that this prejudice inflicted led the children to attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. This film is a testimonial to the profound internal effects of racism produces and the struggle of its victims to claim self-definition and pride.
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Color Schemes [VHS]
28 minutes, 1989
Description: This upbeat, ironic look at America's multicultural society was originally conceived as a video installation for washing machines! Color Schemes uses the metaphor of "color wash" to tackle the conceptions (or misconceptions) of racial assimilation. Challenging racial stereotypes, twelve writer/performers collaborate in four performance sequences that mimic the four wash cycles: soak, wash, rinse and extract. Spinning through this tumble-jumble of America's four-cycle wash load, the performers attempt to capture racial images that remain color vivid.
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The Distorted Image: Stereotype and Caricature in American Popular Graphics, 1850-1922 [VHS]
28 minutes
Description: Cartoons and illustrations from large-circulation magazines reveal the nature and extent of minority group stereotyping in the United States. This presentation, researched and arranged by John and Selma Appel, is designed for students of history, sociology and psychology.
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Flag [VHS]
24 minutes, 1989
Description: Recently, the Supreme Court decided that use of the U.S flag is considered "symbolic speech' and therefore protected under the First Amendment. The controversy surrounding this decision reveals the depth of individual feeling for the flag. For several years, Linda Gibson has explored this issue. Growing up black and female in 1950s America, Gibson locates herself between two cultures and two identities. She presents John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Angela Davis as symbols of wider questions of racism and American history and explores her own relationship to patriotism and the American flag through diaries, snapshots, dance routines, and icons of popular and official culture. Techniques of montage and superimposition foreground the contradictions and tensions among these symbols.
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Klanwatch [VHS]
18 minutes, 1988
Description: In 1971, the Southern Poverty law Center in Montgomery, Alabama was founded by private individuals, lawyers and volunteers willing to sacrifice time and money to work for a cause they believed in. The Center's mission was to confront racial and economic discrimination in the South by using the legal system as its weapon. Seventeen years later, in 1988, the Center has achieved national status and won several court battles against discrimination. The Center fought for representation of black congressmen and congresswomen in the Alabama State Highway Patrol for minority inclusion on the force. Today, the Center continues to monitor suspect groups and agendas (i.e. the Klan, Skinheads, etc.) and provides a valuable resource on Klan activity to law enforcement agencies nationwide. The Center fights for the rights of Jewish, Asian, and African-American citizens of the U.S., as well as any other group threatened by racial or economic discrimination. The group recently won a battle for coal miners in rural Kentucky.
The film's message is that by changing people's minds and hearts, as well as their actions, positive and lasting social benefits can result. |
Prejudice: Dividing the Dream [VHS]
25 minutes, 1992
Description: By offering perspectives on the causes and possible remedies of prejudice, this program helps us, as individuals and as a society, to honestly face the distressing elements of this reality. Victims of prejudice share their suffering and offer their hopes for the future. A cultural diversity workshop, a study of racial identity in African-American children, and a summer camp where teens of different races find understanding and common ground are featured in this video.
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Racism 101 [VHS]
58 minutes, 1988
Description: In 1986, a campus radio station at the University of Michigan aired a program of racial jokes that touched off a heated confrontation between black and white students. Similar incidents at colleges across the country signaled an increase of racism and violence on America's campuses.
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Racism on Campus: Toward an Agenda for Action [VHS]
Two-part program: Part 1 is 90 minutes, Part 2 is 72 minutes; 1988
Description: This film is a recording of the 1988 Governors State University National Videtape Conference co-sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the American Council on Education, the Illinois Committee for Black Concerns in Higher Education, the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges.
Part 1 provides an historical/contemporary perspective on campus racism and examines incidents occurring at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Part 2 focuses on "an agenda for action" and features model programs initiated by the University of Wisconsin system and other institutions.
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Sari Red [VHS]
20 minutes, 1988
Description: Sari Red was made in memory of Kalbinder Kaur Hayre, a young Indian woman who was killed by fascists in a racist attack in England in 1985. The film eloquently examines the effect of violence upon the lives of Asian women in both private and public spheres. In this visual poem, the title refers to red, the color of blood spilt and the red of the sari, symbolizing the sensuality and intimacy between Asian women.
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Skokie: Rights or Wrong? [VHS]
28 minutes, 1987
Description: This film documents a conflict that erupted in 1978 when the American Nazi Party attempted to march in Skokie, Illinois, a community that included may Holocaust survivors. Through interviews with Nazi leaders, their American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorneys, concentration camp survivors, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the film presents a wide range of opinions on the Nazi's right to march in Skokie.
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Strange Fruit [VHS]
Description: While many people assume the song "Strange Fruit" was written by Billie Holiday, it was actually conceived as a poem by a Jewish-American schoolteacher after viewing a disturbing picture of a lynching. "A devastating yet inspiring reminder of when racial terror raged through this country and when blacks and whites worked together to stop it. This film can help strengthen this same struggle in our own era, Morris Dees. |
True Colors [VHS]
19 minutes, 1991
Description: In this provocative edition of ABC's Prime Time, host Diane Sawyer follows two college-educated men in their mid-thirties, one black an one white, through a variety of everyday situations to test levels of prejudice based on skin color. The results are unsettling.
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Whoopie Goldberg Live [VHS]
75 minutes, 1985
Description: Whoopie Goldberg Live is a one-woman showcase by a major talent. Goldberg's characterizations of five ethnically and racially diverse women, including one with a disability, expose external and internalized oppressions as well as universal realities.
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