Stratford Hall Forum on Racial Understanding: American Denial

Join us on April 9, 2016, at 10 a.m. for a free showing of the film "American Denial" in the duPont Library. There will be discussion following the film until around noon. Suggested age for viewing and participating is 13 years - adult. FREE TO THE PUBLIC.

Background:

In 1938, Swedish researcher and Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal plunged into America’s Jim Crow South. His resulting study, An American Dilemma (1944) posed a profoundly unsettling question: How can a people devoted to the American creed of equality, justice, and opportunity for all continue to erect obstacles to those ends based on race? Through Myrdal’s story and contemporary racial dynamics, the film explores how denial, cognitive dissonance, and implicit bias persist and shape all of our lives. Archival footage, drawings, newsreels, nightly news reports and rare Southern home movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s thread through the story, as well as psychological testing and racial attitudes.

Hear from experts – historians, psychologists, sociologists and Myrdal’s daughters – all filmed directly to camera. Witnesses exhume unconscious feelings that Americans have about themselves and others and ask: How to reconcile individual feelings and thoughts with the bedrock values of our democracy?

A Film by Llewellyn Smith, Christine Herbes-Sommers and Kelly Thomson, produced in 2014, "American Denial" is a co-production of Vital Pictures and Independent Television Service. Funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Fletcher Foundation.