Blurring the Color Line | Trailer
Preview: Season 11 Episode 4 | 1m 12sVideo has Closed Captions
How do Chinese grocers in the Jim Crow South complicate America’s binary paradigm of race?
BLURRING THE COLOR LINE follows director Crystal Kwok as she unpacks the history behind her grandmother’s family, who were neighborhood grocery store owners in the Black community of Augusta, Georgia during the Jim Crow era. By centering women’s experiences, Kwok poses critical questions around the intersections of anti-Black racism, white power, and Chinese patriarchy in the American South.
Major funding for America ReFramed provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by Open Society Foundations,...
Blurring the Color Line | Trailer
Preview: Season 11 Episode 4 | 1m 12sVideo has Closed Captions
BLURRING THE COLOR LINE follows director Crystal Kwok as she unpacks the history behind her grandmother’s family, who were neighborhood grocery store owners in the Black community of Augusta, Georgia during the Jim Crow era. By centering women’s experiences, Kwok poses critical questions around the intersections of anti-Black racism, white power, and Chinese patriarchy in the American South.
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Related to This Preview
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- [Crystal] Chinatown where so many Chinese immigrant stories began.
My grandma Pearl, she was born here in 1919.
- [NATASHA] Filmmaker Crystal Kwok was always fascinated by her grandmother Pearl's story.
- [Crystal] She moved with her family to Augusta, Georgia in 1927, where they ran a grocery store.
The grocery store created encounters and relationships, communities.
- [NATASHA] A story about racial divides and connections in the segregated south.
- Segregation was nothing more than a pseudo way of carry on slavery.
- The laws at that time were so limited but not applying to to the Chinese, so they feel this void.
- [Crystal] So we Chinese, occupying a blurry middle, complicates things.
- [NATASHA] Exploring this blurry middle through her own family's story, Crystal finds an untold part of the American story.
- They played the blacks against the Chinese like the Chinese look better than the blacks.
- But as far as our community was concerned, we were all community.
- [NATASHA] Blurring the Color Line on America Reframed.
Watch on World Channel and in the PBS app.
Blurring the Color Line | A Black and Chinese Neighborhood
Video has Closed Captions
In Augusta, Georgia's Black neighborhood, Chinese grocery stores once lined the streets. (1m)
Blurring the Color Line | Acceptance?
Video has Closed Captions
Members of the First Baptist Church of Augusta talk about shared but separate histories. (1m 14s)
Blurring the Color Line | A Community Together
Video has Closed Captions
Residents relive the aftermath of the three days of the 1970 Augusta Riot. (1m 7s)
Blurring the Color Line | James Brown
Video has Closed Captions
Deanna Brown talks with filmmaker Crystal Kwok about her father, James Brown. (53s)
Blurring the Color Line | Jim Crow Laws
Video has Closed Captions
Why were Augusta's Chinese afforded certain privileges that Black residents did not have? (16s)
Blurring the Color Line | Mixed Race: Being Black & Chinese
Video has Closed Captions
A mother and daughter share memories of growing up mixed race within their Chinese family. (2m 56s)
Blurring the Color Line | Preview
Video has Closed Captions
How do Chinese grocers in the Jim Crow South complicate America’s binary paradigm of race? (30s)
Blurring the Color Line | The 1970 Augusta Riot
Video has Closed Captions
The death of a Black teenager led to the largest uprising of Black Americans in the South. (1m)
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship
Major funding for America ReFramed provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by Open Society Foundations,...