Race: The Power of an Illusion is one of the best commentary ever produced by the American based California Newsreel. The three part series play a much significant role not only in investigating the genesis and history of race in the American society, but it also goes an extra mile to discount the widely held misconception of the time that there exist four distinct groups of human beings as could be judged from their physical traits such as skin color.
It is worthy of comment that the highly informative video series offered me the much needed insight upon which the deeper understanding of the sociological concept of race is based. Prior to watching this movie, I was never aware that race is not a biological construct and that there are no bodily differences between people of different races as revealed by the scientific study of genetics on which the producer bases his work.
Borrowing leafs from the video, I am deeply convicted that people of different races are not biologically different given their genetical resemblances. As depicted in the movie, virtually, all human beings are made up of similar tiny biochemical building units called chromosomes whose chemical structures and components have proven to be similar in nature notwithstanding the race to which an individual belongs.
Even though people may look different due to differences in their skin colors, and it is possible to distinquish a Chinese or Czech from an American, skin and hair color are just but physical traits visible from the outside hence do not necessarily imply any biological differences. This far, the movie attests that race is a mere social construct propagated by politics, culture, and economics in the wider American society to irrationalize or, worse, still justify the incidences of widespread social inequalities within the civil society.