Independent Lens

Season 11, Episode 12

Episode Title: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

Air Date: 2010-02-02

Overview:

Who has the authority to define your identity? Considered one of the most controversial scholars of our time, Melville Herskovits — a Jewish anthropologist — challenged the norm in the 1940s when he wrote that black culture wasn’t pathological, it was African. Leading a seismic shift in the way African American culture is understood, Herskovits’s work raises ideas that still