First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery –her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U. S. history. She and nine fellow descendants set off to retrace the Triangle Trade — from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba. Step by step, they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery while also stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations. In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, the film offers powerful new perspectives on the black/white divide. Watch the trailer of P.O.V.’s Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.

Bill Moyers Journal previewed P.O.V.’s Traces of the Trade last Friday on the show Race in America, which examines racial inequality in America through the prisms of the legacy of slavery and the current socio-economic landscape with perspective from historical and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson and Glenn C. Loury, an economist and expert on race and social division.