In “Great American Race Game,” British film director Martin Durkin plunges into the shark-infested waters of American race politics and explores its long and obfuscated history.
There is still racial bigotry in America, as there is elsewhere in the world. It is a terrible thing, and should be exposed and condemned. But there are political forces in America who have gone—in little over a century—from the party of overt and active racism, to the party pandering to racial issues (while exacerbating them), to a party that has created an image of itself as the only righteous defenders of the downtrodden—which they’ve defined as all non-white people. Worse still, this political ideology has not only been able to create an atmosphere where criticism of it or its policies is seen by many as racist in origin, but by reducing all the complexities of governance to race, it’s behaving in the same ways it did a hundred years ago: unabashedly racist….