Beyond skin-deep divisions

Look at your skin color. Now try to see its significance as a mere pigment of our collective imagination.

PBS’ “Race: The Power of an Illusion” asks viewers to reconsider the shared belief in race as a legitimate means of sorting the human species. Using science and an examination of the political and social development of America, the documentary (10 p.m., KCET) argues that race is an artificial distinction.

Biological anthropologist Alan Goodman says in the program that seeing people understand race as a “biological myth” is like “seeing what it must have been like to understand that the world isn’t flat.”

He’s among the distinguished voices -- including paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in one of the last interviews before his death in 2002 -- who provide a chorus of support and scientific explanation for dismissing race as a genetic reality.

But the three-part documentary is even more demanding in its argument: Although “race” represents nothing more than skin-deep characteristics, it’s impossible to ignore because of the insistent emphasis on the subject and the result.

CCH Pounder (“The Shield”) is the effective narrator of the show, which airs on three consecutive Thursdays. It was produced by California Newsreel, a nonprofit documentary production and distribution center.

“Race is a human invention,” science historian Evelynn Hammonds says in the documentary. “We created it, we have used in it ways that have been, in many, many respects, quite negative and quite harmful. And we can think ourselves out of it. We made it; we can unmake it.”