Race (2016) Jesse Owens film.

This year a film has been released called Race, which tells the incredible true story of the American athlete Jesse Owens and his almost single-handed shattering of Nazi Germany’s belief in Aryan supremacy by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic games held in Berlin. The film itself is not the most exciting piece of media created but the performance of Owens who is played by Stephen Jones is solid and the overall story of Owens life is fascinating, as is the over-all story of the 1930’s.

As we know ‘race’ is a social construction and emphasises the biological differences among other humans such as skin colour, “physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them” is stance taken by The American Anthropological Association. The film Race chronicles Owen’s life leading up to the Berlin games and the everyday problems encountered being a person of colour in America at the time, a time when the theory of ‘race’ and ‘racial superiority’ was still a strongly held belief by some.

In the 1930s, the Nazi party in Germany used the media of the time, pamphlets, posters and the like, to actively promote their philosophy of Aryan supremacy over other ‘races’. Aryan is a term used to describe blonde haired, white people and was first introduced through the work of Arther de Gobineau, before being picked up by and influencing the Nazi party’s racial ideology. This form of media was called propaganda, and was an extremely popular way for governments, organisations, etc to share biased opinions about a range of topics, until the word ‘propaganda’ became too to ugly to use so Edward Bernays changed it to Public Relations.

The Nazi party spent countless time and effort in perpetuating their message and ideology of racial superiority, conducting aerial pamphlet drops, organising racial rallies and publishing literature and movies to showcase their belief in Aryan superiority among ‘races’, Jesse Owen’s shattered that philosophy in less than 10 seconds.