By RENÉE M. BARON

On three Tuesday evenings in February, members of the Juilliard community came together to discuss the power, illusion, and complexities of race in America. Organized by Alison Scott-Williams, director of educational outreach, the discussion series was one of Juilliard's contributions to this year's celebration of Black History Month at Lincoln Center. Each week, a diverse group of students, faculty, administrators, staff, and friends viewed an episode of the PBS series Race: The Power of an Illusion. (The series is available in the Juilliard library.) The exchanges that followed, which I facilitated, demonstrated the extent to which the legacy of race informs the way we think about ourselves, each other, and the world in which we live. Moreover, our conversations underscored the Juilliard community's commitment to understanding and transcending the limitations of that legacy.

If race is not real, how can we live in a society where we see and define people according to race?

The 2003 PBS series maintains that race is a social construction—that is, that race is not real in the sense that most people think it is. For many, the idea that race is not a tangible, definable entity is often confusing and disconcerting. If race is not real, how can we live in a society where we see and define people according to race? If race is not real, how did we end up like this? The creators of the series spend considerable time and effort answering these questions. Each episode offers a different vantage point from which to examine the history and complexities of American notions about race. The first episode, "The Differences Between Us," uses contemporary scientific research to demonstrate that, on a biological level, skin color is a genetic variant similar to eye or hair color. It is in no way attached to behavior or intelligence, as some, such as Herrnstein and Murray in their controversial treatise The Bell Curve, contend. The second episode, "The Story We Tell," delineates the manner in which slavery, born out of economic opportunism, became naturalized as an institution based on a belief in black inferiority and white supremacy. "The Houses We Live In" exposes the 20th-century connections between whiteness, citizenship, suburbia, and financial stability. In particular, this third episode reveals how redlining—a practice by financial institutions of denying mortgages, loans, and insurance to inner-city and minority areas—began as government practice. The three-part series concludes that race may not be real, but it does have real-life consequences, albeit profoundly different ones, for those who benefit from it as well as those who suffer from it.

A member of the Liberal Arts faculty initiated each discussion with an opening comment or question. On the first evening, I asked the group to consider the role of culture as defining those differences most often perceived as biological. On the second, Ron Price wondered whether the film fully addressed the complicated nature of white-skin privilege. Despite their benefiting from it, many whites, particularly poor or working-class ones, were just pawns in the game of the small, powerful white elite who created racial policy. On our last evening together, Gonzalo Sanchez, noting the irony of discussing race and housing on the same day as the first Mardi Gras since Hurricane Katrina, reminded us of the effects of redlining in today's world, "not only in the disproportionate devastation visited on New Orleans citizens depending on their real-estate geography, but in the ad-hoc redlining that is taking place as the residents try to make new lives in places like Texas, Mississippi, and Florida, and are steered or subsidized in segregated areas." These evocative comments took the discussion away from being narrowly focused on the films and allowed for a more open forum. This was the first opportunity for some students present to express candidly their experiences with racial difference. For some, the small number of minorities in their hometowns or foreign countries contrasted greatly with the mélange of races and ethnicities at Juilliard and in New York City. For others, the film helped them understand more profoundly that the topic itself is very convoluted, especially in terms of those policies begun by the government decades and centuries ago but the influence of which is felt in our everyday lives. At the end of the last episode, many of us expressed regret for our ignorance and a desire for another opportunity to continue the discussion.

Renée M. Baron, a member of the Liberal Arts faculty since 2004, is a specialist in African-American and Caribbean literatures and cultures.