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Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness poster

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

Film200957 min

Directed by Llewellyn M. Smith

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A documentary on what is it that makes us who we are: an African an African, a Jew a Jew, an Arab an Arab, a white person white -and what do we make of our apparent differences? Not so long ago, all human cultures assumed a natural and unassailable hierarchy - Europeans on the top, blacks on the bottom and everybody else in the middle. The work of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits helped upend many of these assumptions. Herskovits: A Jew at the Heart of Blackness is the journey of a man into international race politics and its consequences for him -and us- in the first half of 20th century, when the battleground in the earliest "culture wars" was newspapers, radio shows, movies and cartoon, all infused with propaganda that explained why Caucasians dominated the world and other peoples as part of life's natural and inevitable order.Read moreLess

A documentary on what is it that makes us who we are: an African an African, a Jew a Jew, an Arab an Arab, a white person white -and what do we make of our apparent differences? Not so long ago, all human cultures assumed a natural and unassailable hierarchy - Europeans on the top, blacks on the bottom and everybody else in the middle. The work of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits helped upend many of these assumptions. Herskovits: A Jew at the Heart of Blackness is the journey of a man into international race politics and its consequences for him -and us- in the first half of 20th century, when the battleground in the earliest "culture wars" was newspapers, radio shows, movies and cartoon, all infused with propaganda that explained why Caucasians dominated the world and other peoples as part of life's natural and inevitable order.

The story

A documentary on what is it that makes us who we are: an African an African, a Jew a Jew, an Arab an Arab, a white person white -and what do we make of our apparent differences? Not so long ago, all human cultures assumed a natural and unassailable hierarchy - Europeans on the top, blacks on the bottom and everybody else in the middle. The work of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits helped upend many of these assumptions. Herskovits: A Jew at the Heart of Blackness is the journey of a man into international race politics and its consequences for him -and us- in the first half of 20th century, when the battleground in the earliest "culture wars" was newspapers, radio shows, movies and cartoon, all infused with propaganda that explained why Caucasians dominated the world and other peoples as part of life's natural and inevitable order.

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Cast & crew

Keenan Cochrane
Keenan Cochrane
Melville Herksovits (Young)
Matt Heron-Duranti
Matt Heron-Duranti
Young Conference Attendee
Sarah McLean
Sarah McLean
Conference Attendee
Carl Schwaber
Carl Schwaber
Melville Herskovits
Karl SteudelKarl SteudelHerskovits lab assistant
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