Independent Lens — Episode 12: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness

You are watching the episode 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