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Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

0% | Feb 15, 2009 | Documentary

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.

Featured Crew

Darryl Harper
Music
Llewellyn M. Smith
Director

Cast

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

Images