The VCCS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer, Carla Kimbrough, has purchased streaming access to a DEI video for each college. Race: The Power of an Illusion is a 3-episode video series. Each episode is linked below. Please note that you will need to click the “VCCS Hosted Video” link and login by entering your @email.vccs.edu email address. Access to the streaming videos is available until February 2025.
Episode 1: The Difference Between Us
Examines the contemporary science – including genetics – that challenges our common sense assumptions that human beings can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.
Uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the western imagination. This episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as ‘natural.’
Episode 3: The House We Live In
Asks, ‘If race is not biology, what is it’? This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics and culture. It reveals how our social institutions ‘make’ race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.
The library also has 1 copy of this series on DVD for 1-week checkout. Please contact us if you have any questions about this resource or accessing it: library@virginiawestern.edu.