American Denial is an hour-long documentary about unconscious bias and racism. Using the story of Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 investigation of Jim Crow laws and their effects as a starting point, American Denial explores the power of unconscious biases and how the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice still impact notions of race and class today.

The documentary premieres on Monday, February 23rd at 9:00 pm on KLRU, the local PBS station.

From the documentary’s website:

Follow the story of foreign researcher and Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal whose study, An American Dilemma (1944), provided a provocative inquiry into the dissonance between stated beliefs as a society and what is perpetuated and allowed in the name of those beliefs. His inquiry into the United States’ racial psyche becomes a lens for modern inquiry into how denial, cognitive dissonance, and unrecognized, unconscious attitudes continue to dominate racial dynamics in American life. The film’s unusual narrative sheds a unique light on the unconscious political and moral world of modern Americans. Archival footage, newsreels, nightly news reports, and rare southern home movies from the ’30s and ’40s thread through the story, as well as psychological testing into racial attitudes from research footage, websites, and YouTube films.

In American Denial, Read More