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Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

Independent Lens

Season 11Episode 12Aired 2010-02-02
Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

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