go_team

After much drawing things out as long as possible, mostly by getting stuff from the library and all the sporadic availability that implies, I finally finished watching Angel yesterday, when Netflix brought me the last disc of season 5 (I'd been doing pretty well holding out, but so much cliffhanger!) I may have cried like a little girl here and there, but not as much as Iggy Pop, who canNOT believe all this white stuff that comes out of the sky, but I digress. Today I've been watching special features, and I started writing this entry when the commentary track to season 5 episode 17 ("Underneath") made me laugh out loud. Adam Baldwin of course managed to get everybody (the director, and the writers, one of whom was some kind of producer, and of course I'm too lazy to look up names) talking about Firefly, but when he said "I'm not bitter" it damn near killed me.

Yeah, I'm a dork.

And now I should probably return these overdue DVDs to the library so the next drooling fan can get them.

What's the latest on Wonder Woman again?

Ok, so apparently PBS has a new series out about the history of the idea of race in the United States, and in particular the evolution of the idea that there are actual biological differences between races, and how really race is a social construct. It's called Race: The Power of an Illusion, and that link goes to the PBS pages about the program, which I haven't really explored yet.

Anyway, I've been reading some reviews of the series, and it's made me curious about some stuff. AlterNet ran a really positive review, of course, but I just stumbled across the New York Times's review (you might need an NYT login to see it), and it's making me really curious to actually see the series in question. The Times reviewer doesn't like Race: The Power of an Illusion much, and the main reason for that dislike (besides the fact that it's a PBS series, which can make for weird production issues) seems to be that the reviewer thinks "race is a social construct" is an old idea, and the series is beating a dead horse and avoiding more interesting issues of race in contemporary society by looking at ancient history.

So. What I'm really wondering about (besides is the series any good) is whether the idea of race as a social construct is really as widespread as the New York Times reviewer seems to think it is. Because maybe it's common knowledge among regular PBS viewers, readers of the late Stephen Jay Gould (who appears in the series), and so forth, but I think there's still plenty of people who think there's valid biological reasons for racial divisions, instead of history and social traditions and suchforth. Now whether the PBS series reaches those people is a different story, but do you really think WKKK (a totally fictional station, I hope) is going to run a series about the evolution of race as an idea and tool of oppression? Allrighty then. Furthermore, if PBS had made a series about the subtle nuances of race in contemporary society based on the idea that race is just a social construct, that assumption would make that series kinda hard for the "race is biological" people to understand (again, assuming such a series would reach them, which I know is kind of a sketchy assumption).

Anyway, my thought is that the PBS series is potentially useful, if only for introducing people to the idea that racial divisions are socially invented and enforced, but maybe it is as PBS-awful as the Times reviewer says? I don't know. I'm mostly just thinking out loud here, and I'm only posting it publically because maybe someone will read it and be able to answer my questions (is the series any good? how widely known and accepted is the idea that race is more a social construct than a biological division between groups of people?)