Race: The Power of an Illusion — PBS Documentary Review

Introduction: Race as a Scientific and Cultural Illusion

The constructed notion of race, as reinforced through rigorous science, is a central theme throughout the first episode of the PBS documentary series Race: The Power of an Illusion. In the past, poor and racist science attempted to classify human individuals according to racial categories and failed miserably. Good science, however, shows that the very notion of racial separations between individuals of different geographies and cultures is in fact specious. Genetically — beneath the surface — the human race shares far more similarities than it does substantial differences, regardless of culturally constructed notions of race or cultural attempts to use science to keep race a central part of scientific discourse.

The series also notes that although different races may appear distinct to the eye, and race is something one may assume one is an expert at — simply because one can see, and because one experiences the world through the lens of being typified (or not) as part of a particular racial category — this does not mean that categories such as Black and White, or Chinese and Caucasian, exist independently of cultural constructions of racial understanding. Rather, the category of race is essentially what we as cultural beings put into it. This is another reason to view race as a constructed notion, one more fraught with emotional than with intellectual implications.

The Limits of Visual and Genetic Classification

Even from the standpoint of visual perception, this method of classifying human beings can be unstable and tenuous. For example, individuals who appear white may identify as African American because they were raised in African American households and because their parents are dark-skinned. Some individuals may appear white as a direct consequence of the legacy of slavery in America, in which white slave owners sexually assaulted enslaved African Americans, causing some descendants to carry physical characteristics associated with whiteness. Thus, one's genetic history may be present in an individual's distant past — not as an expression of "whiteness," but as part of the legacy of slavery and of being Black and oppressed in America. As scholars of race and human categorization have long observed, science and the genetic legacy of race demonstrate that racial identity can become a mutable — changeable and shifting — category within only a few generations, precisely because of the weight of history.

Conclusion: The Confusion of Racial Classification

Race is thus an illusion of human culture. It really makes little sense to sort human beings into racial classifications, because such classifications result in more confusion about culture than they do clarifications. Even in one's own personal and cultural experience today, this dynamic is visible: within only several generations, white teenagers have adopted hip-hop culture as a site of cultural identification, while Black teens have become both culturally assimilated and culturally distinct across a variety of dimensions of American life. The mutability of racial and cultural identity, when viewed through the lens of genetics and history together, strongly supports the documentary's central argument: that race, as a fixed biological category, is and has always been an illusion.