HSESI Media Library

RACE—The Power of an Illusion was first broadcast and released in 2003. The three-part documentary series asks a question so basic it’s rarely raised: What is this thing called ‘race’? What was discovered was that many conventional assumptions about race—for instance, that the world's peoples can be divided biologically along racial lines—are wrong. Yet the costs of racism are very real and can even have biological consequences.

Since its release, RACE—The Power of an Illusion has become one of the country’s most widely used documentaries ever. Millions of people have used the series to scrutinize their own deep-seated beliefs about the idea of race and explore how our social divisions are not inevitable but made.