UNNATURAL CAUSES: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?
CoProduction of California Newsreel and Vital Pictures Inc.
A Four-Hour PBS Series and National Public Engagement Campaign

PREMIERS ON PBS MARCH 27TH 2008 AT 10PM
Check your local listings for details

We know that America is the wealthiest country in the world and spends more on health care than all other countries combined.  Shouldn’t we be the healthiest?  We’re not. We rank only 27th in life expectancy – behind every other modern nation. 29th in infant mortality – behind even Slovakia and Cuba. 

New research shows that medicine, germs, genes, individual behaviors – even access to health care -- don’t explain these data.  Instead, the explanation may very well lie in the kind of society we are creating.There is growing inequality in our country -- not only in wealth, but in health.  And this gap has profound human and economic consequences for us all.

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HERSKOVITS: AT THE HEART OF BLACKNESS
A Sixty Minute Documentary


What is it that makes us who we are—an African an African, a Jew a Jew, an Arab an Arab, a white person white—and what do we make of our apparent differences?  Not so long ago, all human cultures assumed a natural and unassailable hierarchy-- Europeans on the top, blacks on the bottom and everybody else in the middle. The work of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits helped upend many of these assumptions.  Herskovits: A Jew at the Heart of Blackness is the journey of a man into international race politics and its consequences for him--and us-- in the first half of 20th century, when the battleground in the earliest “culture wars” was newspapers, radio shows, movies and cartoon, all infused with propaganda that explained why Caucasians dominated the world and other peoples as part of life’s natural and inevitable order.

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