What is the Advanced Series?

The Advanced Series is open to Original Series alumni only. The series enhances participants’ understanding of race, communication, the history, and narrative that has help lead to race becoming accepted as normal.

The format of each session

During each session, the facilitators set an environment for open, honest, brave conversation. The format of the discussion is around three topic questions with 10-minute breaks during each session:

  • Topic Question 1 looks at the information in each article/video and asks what stood out to you the most?

  • Topic Question 2 asks you where you recognize, have experienced, and/or observed instances of racism related to the specific session’s topic that we are on that day.

  • Topic Question 3 focuses on what you would like to see done or changed, and what you can see yourself doing.

Sessions that participants will experience each week

  • Session I: Introduction to RACE – The Power of an Illusion Documentary – Experts from the film describe the various themes in the documentary, and instructors from UC Berkeley describe ways in which they use the documentary in their instructions.

  • Session II: The Difference Between Us – Episode 1 examines the contemporary science - including genetics - that challenges our commonsense assumptions that human beings can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.

  • Session III: The Story We Tell – Episode 2 uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the Western imagination. The episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as “natural.”

  • Session IV: The House We Live In – Episode 3 asks, if race is not biology, what is it? This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics, and culture. It reveals how our social institutions “make” race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status, and wealth to white people.