Issue 18

Confronting Race & Racism

May 2013

Photo: "Negro going in colored entrance of movie house on Saturday afternoon, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi."  Marion Post Wolcott, circa 1939.  From the Library of Congress, part of a larger collection of Farm Security Administration photographs of signs that enforced racial discrimination.

Contents

Introduction: Racism, hidden away

Ryan Anderson

Race matters and anthropology counts!

Agustin Fuentes

Researching Race While Being Raced: Reflections on Race Politics in Anthropology

Nicole Truesdell

Race and the public perception of anthropology

Francine Barone

Not all White Men Are Rich:Being an Anthropologist and a Suitor in Ghana, West Africa

Douglas La Rose

Medicine in black and white

Candace Moore

Cosmopolitan apartheid? The racial landscape of Contemporary Colombia

Steven Bunce

Five Questions with Jonathan Marks

Introduction: Racism, hidden away

I think a lot of people in the US want to forget about racism.  They don't want to talk about it, bring it up, deal with it, think about it.  They want to tell themselves that racism was something that happened in the distant past.  Racism is a problem for history books.  Racism was a serious problem in the early days, back when the nation was first formed and slavery was an acceptable, rampant institution.  Or maybe back in the days of the civil war, when the US was literally torn apart amidst a time of deep racial inequalities.  Sure, that's when it was a problem.  And perhaps the problems of racism lingered until the 1930s or maybe the 1950s.  Yes, those were the days when things were really bad.  People want to tell themselves that today things are different.  Racism is history.

After all, since the days of the Civil Rights reforms, and the election of the first black president, clearly racism can't be a problem anymore.*  It's over and done with, right?  

Wrong.

A few short stories:

1. It's the mid 1980s.  I am driving through Los Angeles with an older family member.  I am about 8 eight years old.  This family member was part of the "white flight" out of some parts of LA that took place in the 1950s and 1960s.  This family member would often talk about "how things used to be" before all of "those people" started to arrive.  On this particular day this family member told me about a game called "Find The White Person" as we were driving through Los Angeles.  The game was supposed to be funny.  I'm not sure what I thought about it at the time, since I was a kid.  This is one of the subtle ways that certain ideas about "others" get passed down. 

2. Late 1980s, San Diego County, California.  I live in a small suburban neighborhood, not far from the beach.  I am about 12 years old.  A young man, exhausted, walks into our driveway.  He is wearing multiple layers of clothes and two jackets.  It's not cold outside.  He asks me, in quiet Spanish, if I have a can opener.  He's hungry.  Years later I understand things a bit more--this was a young man in his early 20s who had crossed the US-Mexico border in search of work.  A refugee from devastated economies and things like NAFTA.  But back then I was only about 12 and I just knew he was a desperate person.  He looked so tired.  One of the neighbors decided to help him out and let him stay with them for a while.  I thought this was a really kind gesture.  The neighbor across the street, however, was not happy about this.  Not because this migrant had done anything wrong, but because of how he looked.  It was a purely chromatic judgment she made, based more on her own ideas about people from "Mexico" than anything else.  She made some comment about turning the neighborhood into the "United Nations" or something like that.  I don't remember exactly what she said, but I do remember thinking that her anger didn't make any sense.  How could you hate someone you didn't even know?  But, again, I was 12.

3.  Late 1990s.  San Diego.  I am doing some research about family history.  I have some documents that provide little snippets of information about certain members of the family.  One of the stories talks about a person who used to tie his slaves' feet to trees while they were sleeping, put cotton between their toes, and then light them on fire.  They would jump up to run away, but they were bound to the tree.  He thought this was funny.  A joke.  Abusing people for fun and pleasure.  I don't want to see this story in my family history, but it's there, in print.  Undeniable.  I find another document during my search.  It's from the 1860 census.  The record identifies one of my distant relatives from Texas, and the dozen or so slaves he treated as property.  I wonder about the children this person raised, what he taught them.  I think about how these things, these realities, shaped the subsequent generations of my family.  These histories don't just disappear.  They affect.  They literally color realities with the stupidities and brutalities of racism.

4. 2007, Oaxaca, Mexico.  My wife and I are at a minor league baseball game in Oaxaca City.  The visiting team's pitcher starts to lose steam, so they call in a reliever.  He comes in from the bullpen.  He's from the Dominican Republic.  He takes the mound, and starts mowing down home team batters one after another.  The guy is good.  He's clocked at 97 more than once.  I am amazed.  But the drunken home team crowd is not happy.  They belch out vicious racist insults.  This is just one small sliver of the deep racism that pervades Mexico.  It's also when I start to learn that racism has different histories and characteristics in various places.  Racism in the US isn't the same as racism in Mexico.

5. 2009, Kentucky.  We just moved into a new house.  We've been there about a week.  We are the new people in town.  One day I am outside cleaning up after mowing the lawn.  It's late afternoon.  There's a guy walking, and he comes over to talk.  He likes to talk, a lot.  I nod my head, answer his questions.  When he finds out we're new, he starts telling me about "how things are here."  He tells me that certain kinds of people live in this part of the neighborhood, and others live over by the train tracks.  Then he says, "You know, everyone is racist in some way."  I understand this as an invitation to say something he is hoping to hear.  I don't bite.  For the rest of the time I live there I avoid him at all costs.

6. 2013, San Jose del Cabo, Mexico.  This was just a few days ago.  I had just arrived at the airport, and was standing at the car rental counter.  There's an American guy standing there too.  I say hello and engage in a bit of small talk about how hot it is there.  Then he asks me: "Do you like Obama?"  I say: "I don't really know who I like these days."  I'll admit, I wasn't quite ready for what came next.  The guy then proceeds to tell me a ridiculously offensive, racist joke about "people from Africa."  I then realize that his question about Obama was another one of those subtle tests to see where I stood.  I make it clear to him that I don't think his joke is anywhere near funny.  He doesn't say much and goes about his business, turns in his car, and goes on his way to the US.  I can't help but think about how many people like him are out there.  And I also wonder: did I say enough?  Should I have done something more?  Sometimes these things happen so quickly it's hard to know how to react.

Racism is out there.  Some people experience it in more subtle ways, and others, obviously, in more brutal ways.  More violent ways.  More relentless ways.  But the issue of racism--despite what so many Americans want to tell themselves--is anything but resolved.  It persists.  It plagues us.  And it's something that corrodes on a very deep, very personal, and daily level.

This issue is about anthropology and confronting racism.  It's not enough.  There needs to be more.  More education, more confrontation, more conversation.  But then, I don't think that education and conversation and dialog and all of that is enough.  It's not.  I don't think nice Powerpoint lectures about race are going to make the problems go away.  There needs to be something more, something deeper.  One thing is for sure though: racism surely isn't going away if we pretend that it's some historical artifact.  And that's what we've been doing here in the US for far too long: lying to ourselves, telling ourselves that race was a problem.  Ending that pattern, that lie, would be a start.  Then we can move on to the fact that race is about a lot more than just skin color, it's also about power.

***

Thanks to Agustin Fuentes, Nicole Truesdell, Francine Barone, Douglas La Rose, Candace Moore, Steven Bunce, and Jonathan Marks for taking part in this issue.  As always, I encourage reader comments, questions, concerns, and thoughts.  If you don't want to post on here, you can always email us at anthropologies project at gmail dot com.  Thanks for reading.

RA

*This is an argument that I hear among pundits (and others) fairly often.  The argument goes like this: since the Civil Rights era, all kinds of changes have happened, and racism is all but gone.  The election of Barack Obama is somehow proof of this.  This sort of argument often goes hand in hand with the "you're just pulling the race card" charge, which is sometimes used against anyone who tries to bring up the subject of racism.

Race matters and anthropology counts!

In the USA we are confused about, and fascinated with, race. Let me give you two examples:

#1- Much discussion about the recent terror attack in Boston circled around the race of the perpetrators, and once they were caught it got even more interesting.   Are the Tsarnaevs white?  They are from the Caucus region so they are Caucasoid and/or Caucasian, right?  Isn’t that white?  It must be because Wikipedia tells us it is. But, wait, they are Muslim and sort of swarthy…that can’t be white, can it? What is going on here? Why is whether a person is “white” or not such an important element in American (USA) discourse?

#2- When my recent book “Race, monogamy and other lies they told you: busting myths about human nature” came out I got a slew of calls, emails and reviews accusing me of a) pushing a politically-correct liberal agenda, b) not understanding science, being a bad scientist or just plain stupid, c) having absurdly narrow concept of race, and d) being totally out of touch with reality.  Many of those who contacted me were really, really angry about what I said about race: that race is not biology, that race is dynamic and culturally constructed, and that racism has devastating effects on individuals and society.  However, there is no contesting this position: the data are in, and it is the position held by a majority of anthropologists, biologists, geneticists, and others who study human biological variation.  Why do some folks get so angry when confronted with an overwhelmingly robust dataset demonstrating that race, as we use it, is neither biological or nor a core part of our nature? 

The explanation in both of these cases is that race matters, but it is a concept that is consistently misrepresented, misunderstood, and misused.  Race is important in the USA, but the way we use race does not reflect biological reality, even though the majority of folks think it does.  There is currently one biological race in our species: Homo sapiens sapiens. However, that does not mean that what we call “races” don’t exist.  Societies construct racial classifications, not as units of biology, but as ways to lump together groups of people with varying historical, linguistic, ethnic, religious, or other backgrounds. These categories are not static, they change over time as societies grow and diversify and alter their social, political and historical make-ups. If you look across the USA you can see that there are patterns of racial difference, such as income inequalities, health disparities, differences in academic achievement and representation in professional sports.  If one thinks that these patterns of racial differences have a biological basis, if we see them as “natural,” racial inequality is then a natural part of the human experience (remember a book called The Bell Curve?).  This fallacy influences people to see racism and inequality not as the products of economic, social, and political histories but as a natural state of affairs; and that is dangerous

The USA needs serious assistance dealing with race, and anthropology can a major part of the intervention.  However, we have a problem: few people read anthropology, fewer know what anthropology is, and there is serious misrepresentation of “anthropology” in the public eye.

Wikipedia informs us that “Anthropologists generally consider the Cro-Magnons to be the earliest or "proto" representatives of the Caucasoid race” and much of the public think that Jared Diamond is a star anthropologist. Actually, we don’t and he is not.  But more people visit Wikipedia to find out about race than visit the AAA understanding race website and many more read Diamond’s books about being human than those of actual anthropologists.  Unfortunately, most commonly on the topic of race, most people don’t refer to any source at all, they “know” reality because the experience it every day.  Their common sense (which as Geertz reminded us is as constructed as most cultural beliefs) lays clear that white, black, asian, latino, etc.. are different things and maybe even natural kinds. Anthropology is all about making the familiar strange; we need to use this skill to make nonsensical the popular perceptions of race and clearly demonstrate what it is not.

This is not an easy task. Most anthropologists not particularly active in the mainstream media or public view, and when we are our contributions are frequently discounted as being overly “PC” or liberal, or detached from the reality of everyday people.  It does not help that much of what we have to convey is really quite complicated.  Real and sustainable solutions to racial inequalities and the problems of race relations in the USA will be slow to emerge as long as a large percentage of the public holds on to the myth of biological races.

So what do we do about it?  The American Anthropological Association is already tackling this issue, and individual anthropologists are taking the public perception of race to task (and have been doing so for almost a century!). We need to keep it up and become more present on the web, in the media, and in people’s lives.  On the topic of Race anthropology MUST be public, loud, and adamant:

1) Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation, but human variation research has important social, biomedical, and forensic implications.

2) Patterns of variation in human groups have been substantially shaped by culture, history, language, ecology, and geography.

3) While race is not biology, racism can certainly affect our biology (especially health and development).

4) There is no inherently biological reason for inequalities across the groups we label white, black, asian, latino, etc...  Nor is there a “natural” explanation for why race relations are often difficult, but there are lots of interesting social, political, economic, psychological, and historical ones. 

5) If race is not “nature,” then racial inequalities, categories, and realties can change.

Getting this kind of information into public is critical and anthropological intervention in the race issues in the USA is more important than ever…we cannot stand aside in the face of racism or ignorance.  Anthropological voices, and our data, need to be heard and seen loud and clear.

Agustin Fuentes, U of Notre Dame

Five questions with Jonathan Marks

Ryan Anderson: You focus on race and racism in a lot of your work. Why?

Jonathan Marks: Because it is the question that defined the field of physical anthropology for most of its existence, and we have learned a lot about it. But when I was in graduate school, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, physical anthropology was busily defining itself out of relevance. People were publishing fine books on, say, “Human Variation and Microevolution,” without mentioning the word race. They said, “There is no race, there is just population genetics, we have solved this problem, good night.” And everybody else said, “Actually race is important, and if you won’t talk to us about it, we’ll turn to sociologists and fruitfly geneticists, and worse yet, even to psychologists.”

So I’ve been interested in bringing the knowledge of the actual patterns of human variation, which biological anthropology ought to be the authoritative scientific voice of, to the broader scholarly community. This also involves the question of how biological and cultural anthropology connect. Race is a perfect example, because to make sense of race, you have to understand it as based to some extent on natural differences, and to some extent on the arbitrary cultural processes of classification, and the imposition of meaningful distinctions upon the universe of our experiences. So it isn’t really genetic, and it isn’t really imaginary--race is a fundamentally biocultural category, or a unit of nature/culture.

That’s why history shows so nicely how geneticists have been consistently able to identify human races when they have expected to find them, and to fail to identify human races when they don’t expect to find them. That’s because geneticists study difference, but race is meaningful difference. It’s the imposition of qualitative categories upon the quantitative facts of ancestry. The question of race isn’t whether two samples are different (because two human populations will always be different), but rather about whether the difference between them is large enough, or of the right kind, that makes the samples categorically different, rather than just being variants of a single category. That’s anthropological.

RA: How do you define "racism"?

JM: The political act of judging an individual by the properties attributed to their group, in which the group represents some salient aspect of the individual’s ancestry. We would like to imagine, rather, that we are judged by our own particular qualities and achievements. That is a different fallacy from the assertion that the US Census categories represent fundamental natural divisions of the human species, which is sometimes called “racialism” or “taxonomism”.

RA: Sometimes I hear the argument that we are living in "post-racial" times, and that racism is no longer an issue these days. What's your response to this sort of argument?

JM: The average life expectancy of black person in America is about 4 years shorter than that of a white person. Talk to me when they’re even.

RA: If you could clear up one misconception about race here in the US, what would it be?

JM: That race is a unit of biology or genetics, equivalent to a subspecies of chimpanzees or goats; rather than appreciating that is a unit of anthropology – a biocultural unit, the intersection of the biology of difference and the cultural facts of classification and sense-making, without a clear homolog in other species.

RA: Are anthropologists doing enough to confront racism these days?

That’s a trick question because both “yes” and “no” are problematic answers. I think the topic is being taught in more bio-anthro curricula than it was a generation ago, and that’s a good thing. There’s also a lot good books just out, that really highlight the biocultural nature of the enterprise: Jonathan Kahn’s Race in A Bottle, which goes into the story of BiDil , which the FDA approved for use specifically in African-American patients’ Rina Bliss’s Race Decoded, which looks at how human population geneticists conceptualize and talk about race; Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People, which looks at the intellectual and political history; Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts; Racecraft, by Karen and Barbara Fields – there’s a lot of good, accessible interdisciplinary scholarship now, which creatively engages anthropology.

Not all White Men Are Rich:Being an Anthropologist and a Suitor in Ghana, West Africa

Introduction

Identity consists of a package of signifiers including such seemingly disparate components as ethnicity, gender, class, and religion. These components interact with each other in a way that makes their individual poignancies difficult to determine (Yelvington 1995). These components, however, are not simply meaningless parts of a meaningful whole – they shift and battle for primacy in a hierarchy that is continuously molded by contexts, reflections, and moving experiences. Identity is constructed based on experiences that consist of real structures and real narratives, and in this sense it has an objective meaning based in an objective social reality. Moya and Hames-Garcia argue “a theory of identity is inadequate unless it allows a social theorist to analyze the epistemic status and political salience of any given identity and provides her with the resources to ascertain and evaluate the possibilities and limits of different identities” (Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000: 7). Identity, then, has a real epistemic status and projects a real political salience that is interpreted differently in various contexts – but this variability does not mean that identity is not real. Moya and Hames-Garcia’s point that identity is neither a static, unwavering whole nor an entirely porous, meaningless swarm of ambiguous notions allows us to reclaim identity from an argument that has had a shaky footing in meaningful discourse. Though Moya and Hames-Garcia may go a bit far in proclaiming a new theoretical movement – postpositivist realism – Mohanty’s point that “identities are theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways” (Mohanty 1993: 43) is a profoundly liberating one. Identity should not be consumed either by the theoretical currents of postmodern theory nor the more archaic curse of essentialism. Rather, it should be reclaimed by social scientists (and individuals) as a legitimate, real, and profoundly important variable in the human experience.

As a white, male, American socio-cultural anthropologist working in West Africa, my identity consistently functions as both an obstacle and an opening to the worldviews and daily experiences of the Africans I work with. Furthermore, as a foreigner who is engaged to a Ghanaian woman, my foreign identity speaks more saliently to my interactions with my fiancé, my in-laws, and the community I work in (which is the same community that she is from). My identity - or, rather, the signifiers that my disposition consists of - in the Ghanaian context invokes more assumptions about me than I will ever be able to realize or understand. These assumptions strongly flavor the interactions I have with my informants and the ways in which Ghanaian worldviews, experiences, and needs are presented to me. In the following, I will try and tease out some of the ways my white male American identity affects my fieldwork as an applied anthropologist concerned with the processes and opportunities of development in the West African region. I will also look at the ways in which my identity affects my personal relationships with my fiancé and her family. This analysis lends much credence to Moya and Hames-Garcia’s assessment of the “epistemic status and political saliency” of identity and the intrinsic importance that identity has in social, cultural, political, and economic systems of meaning.

Reflections on Fieldwork in Ghana

In “Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco” Paul Rabinow discusses some of the frustrations he experienced when doing anthropological fieldwork in a small mountainous village in Morocco. Most dominant among these frustrations were some of the profound misunderstandings Rabinow made about his informants and other misunderstandings his informants made about him. At one point, a simple misunderstanding about an informant’s access to Rabinow’s car boiled over into a near emotional breakdown for Rabinow. How could he expect to understand life in this remote Moroccan village if he couldn’t even understand a basic expectation that one of his informants had about him? Rabinow understands fieldwork as “a process of intersubjective constructions of liminal modes of communication” (Rabinow 1977: 155). Worldviews and experiences are twice removed, interpreted, and reinterpreted in the anthropologist and informant’s minds – only to be interpreted once again in the writing process. I would argue that in the ethnographic incident that Rabinow describes, something more than just a difference in conceptual understanding is occurring. It is a difference in identifying (no pun intended) the roles and intentions of the actors based on identity. Rabinow, a white Anthropologist from the United States, is carrying on and within him a set of signifiers that are functioning to establish an identity that can be read and interpreted as a physical text in the context of his fieldwork.

When I travel in West Africa I normally get from one place to another via local transportation. In other words, I travel by tro-tro: a type of large mini-van that is converted into what functions as an inter-city bus. Whenever I stand at the bus station or on the side of the road, the bus will pull up to me and the person sitting in the front passenger side of the vehicle will move to the back of the van and the driver will ask me to sit in the front: “Master, come and sit here, I beg you.” If I insist on sitting in the back of the bus, I will be told - with a substantial quantity of vehemence - that I am ungrateful and unfriendly. If I sit down in the front of the bus, the driver and the passengers behind me will begin asking me friendly questions and trying to get my phone number or address so that they can have “a connection” in America. Ostensibly, all of this happens for the simple reason that I am white and foreign. It appears to have little to do with my class or how much money I have – if a wealthy Ghanaian is sitting in the front with a suit, tie, and suitcase he or she will also be expected to move to the back of the van so I can sit in front.

No matter how hard I try to communicate the injustice I feel in this scenario to the people on the bus, it becomes a useless task. Many times I have tried to explain to Ghanaians the black experience in the United States and the historical moment when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front of the bus. They look at me with a blank face and normally respond by saying something to the effect that in America, we must make things way too complicated for our own good. After some time, I feel that I have finally realized where the misunderstanding was nested. In trying to communicate this idea, I mistook my reading of skin color for their reading of skin color. In fact, the situation probably had nothing to do with skin color at all. I only perceived it that way because of my cultural and historical background. It wasn’t until just before I left Ghana that I learned that African Americans traveling in Ghana are also asked to sit at the front of the bus. Reflecting on all those moments in which I tried to lecture a vehicle of Ghanaians on the racism they were practicing, I suddenly felt horrible for the misunderstanding I had committed and produced. Not only had I spent two years projecting my understanding of identity on to Ghanaians, but also I had completely misunderstood their reason for asking me to sit at the front of the bus – I was a guest in their home.

Doing anthropological fieldwork in Ghana presents similar problems. The first time I worked in Ghana I was employed as a Peace Corps volunteer in agroforestry and environmental development. My work was focused in the Jasikan District of the Volta Region, a relatively small and impoverished region that rarely was the focus of government programs or international development efforts. Having a background in anthropology (a bachelor’s degree), I tried to incorporate anthropological ideas into the projects I collaborated with the community on. For instance, I wanted to get to the bottom of why children weren’t going to school. I had been teaching at a local Junior Secondary School for a few weeks when suddenly students stopped showing up to class. I pondered the reasons why they weren’t coming to class, and thought it must have something to do with me. I looked over my teaching plans, tweaked them, and tried to make them more applicable to the local area. The students continued to be absent, and the ones who did show up would look out the window, fumbling with their pencils and swinging their feet waiting for school to end for the day. I became frustrated and started assuming things about the dedication of the students and the views towards education in Ghanaian culture and society. One day, I was talking over my frustration with one of the other teachers when she looked at me and laughed. “Oh, Douglas. Can’t you see that it’s raining? They are at the farm! This is a village, we get our food from the farm. Who do you expect to harvest the food?” Children, I had thought, belonged in school. It was something that seemed to me to be part of a child’s identity.

The way I was perceived at local meetings with farmers was similar. My foreignness and my whiteness were seen as a resource. To me, I was someone who had come to collaborate with these local non-governmental organizations. I was going to work at the same level as the farmers and help them design projects and write proposals. They discouraged me from going to their farms and helping them weed and plant maize or cocoa. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to pick up a cutlass and go farming for a day. When I finally tried, I learned my lesson the hard way. My wrists became swollen and I broke out in a terribly uncomfortable heat rash. “You see,” my counterpart said to me, “you white people can’t do this kind of work!” At the meetings, the farmers would look at me when I spoke, becoming more and more interested as the topic focused on more specific details of the project. It wasn’t until a year or so into my service that I realized that they weren’t just focusing on the details of the project, they were anticipating the moment when I would mention the amount of money that the proposal was going to be for, and who was going to benefit from it. My perception of my role as someone who was going to be at level with the farmers and work with them through the coarse nature of the work had been all wrong. To them, I was a good friend and someone they knew well. But I wasn’t one of them, I was a resource that they had invited to play a specific type of role that was far different from what they did. My identity as a white, American, educated male was a resource that they had acquired and the assumptions about what those components meant produced a powerful buzz around me that everyone but I could sense.

It took me almost two years to realize the extent to which my identity flavored my interactions with Ghanaians. My background as a white American has enculturated in me an ideology that claims that differences should not be noticed and that assumptions should not be made about people based on components of their identities. Even though race, ethnicity, gender, and class define social relations in the United States, we still hold an ideal of equality that strives to be “blind” to such differences. In this sense, the difference of my body in Ghana was something I took for granted. I was seen as a person who was a resource with political potential and opportunity. Doors were opened for me, but at the same time I was told what people expected me to want to hear. I felt completely free, yet there were dissembling obstacles of expectation everywhere I went. In many cases, I wasn’t told what was really going on until the tediousness of the conversation exhausted the listener – such as the teacher at the school. As an anthropologist, this poses an especially deep and exceptionally strong problem for my fieldwork. If I don’t explicate my intentions and purposes to my informants and the people I work with, I will probably be presented with an entirely different story than the one I really want to get. But then again, even if I do explicate my intentions, how am I to know that my identity won’t betray me, or their identity them?

Learning to Laugh in an International, Interracial Relationship

My fiancé, Ama Kwakyewa Juliet Amankwah, is just about the funniest person I have ever met. Her sense of humor shines through any ambiguity we face in our relationship, and indeed her sense of humor is what allows our relationship to function in a healthy way. One day, we were having a minor argument about when we should have children. I told her that I thought we needed to wait – I would be moving back to the United States and she would remain in Ghana while we waited for her visa. She became upset because, according to her, in Ghana a woman without a child was viewed as a serious burden to her husband and a drain on his resources. I told her that I didn’t feel that way. Nevertheless, she explained to me, that is how the situation would be perceived, and she would be the one to have to bear the brunt of the attack. A father, I replied, could not have a child and then move away simply with the expectation to return. Many Ghanaian fathers travel for substantial portions of time to work on different seasonal jobs such as the cocoa harvest, coffee harvest, or on fishing boats. According to my perspective, a child needs to have a father figure and to be raised under both their father and mother’s care. “No, no, no, Douglas. I know the real reason you don’t want to have a child in Africa. You want to wait to have the child in America because if it is born there it will be white, if it is born here it will be black.” I told her that she was being absurd, that being born in Africa doesn’t make you black. I started ranting and raving about how skin color was something that was passed down genetically. “Ah!” she said, clearly frustrated and suddenly laughing, “I’m not talking about skin color!”

She wasn’t talking about skin color. Calling someone white simply means that they are from somewhere else. Ironically, even a newborn baby in Ghana is called “obruni” which literally translates to “someone who has come from across the horizon.” When a foreigner walks through the streets of Ghana, they are also called “obruni”. It literally means that you are fresh from some place else and that you can’t be expected to understand and follow all of the norms. I had misunderstood her point, and we both had a good laugh about it. Though the situation was never totally resolved (she still wants to have children before she moves to the United States) we learned to laugh about the intricacies of the misunderstanding. In our relationship, these kinds of situations emerge all of the time, and our strategy of learning how to deal with them is through laughter. Just as multiracial comedians explain that “the best way to come up with original material is to draw upon personal experiences or observations” (Li Po Price 2000: 184) so do Juliet and I draw upon our personal experiences and misunderstandings to create a healthy, intersubjective, and humorous understanding of each others’ identities.

These misunderstandings are almost all anchored in identity. What it means to be white, black, or colored is something that is particularly significant in an interracial relationship. Across different cultures - United Statesian and Ghanaian, for example - this becomes something even more nuanced. For Juliet and I, mutual understandings of our different cultural identities haven’t been fully constructed, and at this point what it means to have a white or black identity is almost entirely subsumed by what it means to be United Statesian or Ghanaian. As evidenced above, my understanding of what it means to be white in the United States is obviously very different from what it means to be white in Ghana. Her understanding of what it means to be black in Ghana is also radically different from what it will be like for her to be a black woman in the United States (a challenge that we will have to face in the near future). As a woman, Juliet understands her identity much different than how a woman in the United States would understand it. Many of her views on gender identity would probably disappoint or enrage white, western feminists – why should a woman be expected to have a child at all? But for Juliet, a woman has a particular role and a man has a particular role. Any talk of liberation from such systems of domination would cause Juliet to roll her eyes. “Douglas, things are already confusing. Why make them more confusing?”

Whiteness being a resource in a village meeting also translates to whiteness being a resource to my in-laws. In a traditional Ghanaian marriage, a man will visit his partner’s family and inform them that he plans on marrying their daughter. He will prostrate himself before the father and set down two bottles of expensive liquor, normally European Schnapps or imported rum. He will then open one of the bottles and take a drink for himself, proving to the father and mother that he has not come to poison them. After asking the father and mother for their daughter’s hand in marriage, they will send a list around to their relatives in various towns or regions of the country (or, at times, to other countries) and inform them that this young man has come to ask for their daughter’s hand. Normally, the family will request things such as cloth for sewing, suitcases, shoes, hats, or other utilitarian items. When I proposed to my fiancé, however, an entirely different kind of list came back to me. Her grandfather, for example, informed me that I would have to commit a car to him in order for him to allow his granddaughter to marry me. One of her uncles wrote that I should furnish his internet café with six brand-new computers. When I returned to her family’s house and informed them that I would never be able to meet their demands, they looked at the list and laughed. “Douglas, as for us, we know you. We know that you aren’t a very rich man, and that not all white men are rich. Don’t worry, we will inform your in-laws that you are just like them, and then they will ask you for things that they know any one of them could give your family if they wanted to marry your sister.”

Conclusion

As a cultural anthropologist, it would be convenient to be able to sweep aside arguments about the tainting effects of identity on ethnographic inquiries. But to claim that identity is an ephemeral and forbidden unit of analysis pushes peoples’ worlds and meanings into the realm of the nonsensical and insignificant – a quite paradoxical stance for any anthropologist to take. Similarly, the process of essentializing identities fixes them in over determined and uncreative, non-adaptive categories that function to dissemble an individual identity’s components and place people into groups they may find unmeaningful or oppressive. To reclaim identity is to recognize its reality, poignancy, and role in determining the way that we experience life.

In the above, I have demonstrated some of the ways that my white, American, male identity has functioned in my work as an anthropologist and Peace Corps Volunteer as well as they way it has functioned in my relationship to my Ghanaian fiancé and her family. In all of these contexts, my identity has guided me in understanding my experiences in a foreign culture and society – rightly and wrongly. It has also been a text that my informants and my extended family have read both to understand me and to know what to expect from me. For example, my cultural background prescribed what I considered to be fundamental requirements of an identity of male fatherhood to me. This prescription was at odds with what my fiancé expected of me as a good husband – to understand her need as a woman to have children regardless of my continual presence. Identity is not just an abstract concept with a history rooted in over-generalized essentialisms. Nor is it just a base and ethnocentric concept that post-modern theory has carte blanche privilege to attack. Identity represents a convergence of traits that inform us about our experiences in the world. It also acts as a text in which the world looks to understand us.

Douglas La Rose

Bibliography

Li Po Price, Darby. 2000. “Mixed Laughter.” In We Are a People: Narrative and Multipicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity, Eds. Paul Spickard and W. Jeffrey Burroughs, 2000,Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mohanty, Satya P. 1993. “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition.” In Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postodernism, Eds. Moya and Hames-Garcia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 29-67.

Moya, Paula M., and Michael R. Hames-Garcia. 2000. Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yelvington, Kevin A. 1995. Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Cosmopolitan apartheid? The racial landscape of Contemporary Colombia

The disproportionate marginality and victimization of Colombia’s ethnic minorities has its origins in what Cristina Rojas describes as its ‘regime of representation: a space of presences and absences [including] things that appear, that are visible, as well as those that are suppressed, condemned to remain backstage’. The two administrations of President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) were characteristic of this enduring regime. Uribe watered down the complexities of the nation’s history, diversity and political landscape to make it more manageable, prosperous and secure. In his Colombia, the business world, multinationals, and a concentrated executive power base had starring roles, with ethnic minorities and peasants appearing as extras in the background. Regard for the environment, land reform and the local ceded in favor of mining and energy megaprojects. In sum, rural territories were finally converted into little more than the ‘primary sector’.

That the discovery of ‘strategic lands’ suppresses the right to ‘ancestral lands’ is an implicit notion of Eliana Rosero’s description of the ‘three key eras’ of the official history of Afro-descendent Colombians: Following their total marginalization and invisibility for centuries, in the 1980s they were granted specific rights as an ethnic group, culminating in the institutionalization of their traditional laws and collective territories with the 1991 Constitution. From 2000, a third phase began: the discovery of resource-rich deposits in these territories and the ensuing attacks, displacements and violation of their right to self-determination. The ongoing reorganization of territory by armed groups complements the imperative of certain economic and political elites to use forced displacement to 'homogenize' the population in a given area.

Afro-descendants comprise nearly a quarter of Colombia’s population, and are concentrated in the regions of the Pacific Coast and the southwest of the country, although the Caribbean archipelago of San Andres and Providencia is home to an almost exclusively Afro descendent population. The category itself refers to citizens with varying proportions of African heritage. As the most recent census suggests, identification with this ethnic category is loaded and complex: In 2005, for the first time, Colombians were asked to assign their own racial category. Ironically, this ‘enlightened’ process of self-ascription deflated the earlier official figure of 26% to 10.6%.

Peter Wade describes how ethnic minorities in Colombia tend to be regarded as the ‘guardians of the natural environment’, a category that, while vital to the institutionalization of the rights for traditional communities, has calcified a stereotype of ‘blackness’ as antithetic to economic growth and modernization. From the late nineteenth century, Bogota’s elites proliferated a European cultural imaginary and political order of the capital that denigrated the attitudes, behaviors – even dress styles – of ethnic minorities and the urban mestizo labor force. This centralist hegemony retained formidable power even as its population soared and the city became a patchwork of economic migrants and displaced persons from all over the country. A tradition of regionalism, the location of ethnic minorities as exogenous to the major urban commercial hubs, and the concentration of wealth and power in elite institutions, have generated glaring disparities, particularly as the gulf widens between cities and regions. Currently, some one million Afro-Colombians are estimated to be living in Bogotá, a city with a population nearing nine million.

Bogota is nowadays an emblem of Colombia’s improved security and place on the global stage as a cosmopolitan metropolis. In April 2008, African-American sociologist Fatimah Williams Castro found herself at the sharp end of this process when she joined with her Afrocolombian friends for a night out in Bogota’s Zona Rosa, an upmarket zone frequented by the capital city’s young white elite and foreign tourists. Castro and her friends attempted to enter a number of venues, but were consistently met with vague reasons for why they could not go inside. The event drew the interest of local lawyers, who assisted the group to petition the Supreme Court, which later ruled that certain parties had violated their fundamental rights to equality, honor and dignity.

Feature article of a 2011 issue of Hello! Magazine, Colombia. The text reads: 'The most powerful women of the Valle de Cauca region in their stunning Hollywood-style mansion'. At the rear of the photo are two Afro-Colombian women dressed in traditional maid outfits. The image generated scathing criticisms of racism and moral bankruptcy amongst the country's upper classes

In my interviews with residents on social class in Bogota, one Afro-descendent respondent emphasized that it is ‘not easy being black’ in Colombia, one should not assume that a solidarity exists amongst Afrocolombians based on a shared narrative of discrimination. ‘I am a relatively successful, economically comfortable, well-educated Baptist woman. My outlook is completely different to that of a displaced Colombian living in hard conditions. The fact that we might both happen to be black doesn’t mean anything really’. No single demographic category expressed a consensus toward the primacy of race as a discriminating factor. The closest I came to a consensus reflected what human rights lawyer Mauricio García describes a prominent ‘class-based racism’ in Colombia, by which racial differences have ceased to be clear-cut and yet the ‘upper class tends to be whiter and the lower class darker’.

One Colombian anthropologist asked: ‘Have you ever seen a black person driving a car in Bogota?’ I relayed this question to an Afro-Colombian researcher writing her postdoctoral dissertation at Colombia’s most elite university. ‘Well, my Dad has a car’, she said with a smirk, ‘but I can tell you that there are very few Afros in Bogota’s upper strata. I could count them on my hand’. A local historian was emphatic: ‘You can see hundreds of black people driving cars in Cali, which is a more Afro-populous city’. A politics student expressed a similar territorialization of ethnic groups: ‘There are black elites, but in the black regions’.

Select cultural and aesthetic hallmarks are mobilized as part of Bogota’s performance of cosmopolitanism and the projection of a tourist and business-friendly global city. Condemned to remain backstage are the stark division of black and white social spaces and the tacit exclusion of ethnic minorities. The subtle forces of spatial distancing and socioeconomic exclusion of ethnic minorities do not fit neatly with any claims of an institutionalized racial segregation. When Castro discussed her experience with Afro-Colombian residents of Bogota, most were simply mystified as to why she even wanted to spend time there.

Black residents have trickled into the domains of Bogota’s upper classes in recent years – but more so in professional environments, rather than social circles. Ana recounted her ‘rebellious adolescence’ in which she dated a black guy and was forbidden to bring him into the house. Now she is engaged to a currency trader with German heritage, and they both dine with her parents on a weekly basis. Another resident described how, in recent years, a handful of black Colombians have become members of the country club he and his family frequent: ‘This is a racist society, but it is not apartheid’. For many, black residents are not shunned, but they are anomalies in the city landscape.

As head administrator of the science faculty at one of Bogota’s top universities, many appear in Claudia’s doorway in search of signatures. ‘When they see a black woman sitting behind the desk’, she tells me, the following exchange tends to occur:

“I’m looking for the head program authority”

--- “Yes, that’s me”

“I mean the head of administration. The person who can approve my admission”

--- “Also me”

Her father, born in the predominantly Afro department of Chocó, was determined to not end up working as a laborer his whole life. By the time he completed secondary school, he knew he had to move to the nearest city, Medellín, and find his way into a private university. After graduating in veterinary science, he established his own clinic in Barranquilla, and began to save money for her education from the moment of her conception. ‘Not birth – conception’, she reiterated.

In spite of decades of positive economic growth and democratization, the recurrent application of economic and political paradigms originating in the Global North have negatively impacted the country’s rural-dwelling populations and ethnic minorities, while facilitating the illegal expropriation of land and public resources. This monopolization of wealth is greatly aided by illegal groups, who engage in clandestine alliances with powerful officials and economic elites determined to uphold rigid traditions and inhibit change in economic, political and social structures (Acemoglu et al, 2009; Lopéz et al 2010). The extreme right-wing ideology and willingness of paramilitaries to swiftly circumvent state functions complements a range of neoliberal principles, namely its preference for a monocultural logic and the accelerated internationalization of the economy (Springer 2012).

In the meantime, as Maria Clemencia Ramirez captures in her ethnography of community leaders in Putumayo, those from remote regions make every effort to attain formal education in cities so as to ‘gain access to the level of social and cultural capital necessary to make connections between local and national struggles’. The painstaking process of attaining this symbolic capital contrasts violently with the whirlwind speed with which privileged and violent actors pilfer, hoard and commodify the country’s natural resources – a quite literal case-in-point of what Teresa Brennan describes as capitalism’s ‘inherent need to occupy more space’.

‘It is jarring for them to see me sitting behind the desk’, Claudia chuckles, while imitating a serious of incredulous expressions, ‘They think I’m here because I must be cleaning it’.

Steven Bunce

References

Acemoglu, D. et al. (2009). The Monopoly of Violence: Evidence from Colombia. Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bourdieu, P. (1985). The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society , 14 (6), 723-44.

Brennan, T. (2003). Globalization and Its Terrors: Daily Life in the West. New York: Routledge.

Garay, J. (2003). Crisis, exclusión social y democratización en Colombia. XI Congreso Colombiano de Trabajo Social: Realidad Social, Práctica Profesional e Identidad del Trabajador Social. Manizales, Colombia.

García Canclini, N. (2004). Diferentes, desiguales o desconectados: El Patrimonio Intercultural de los diferentes. Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals , 66-67, 113-133.

García Villegas, M. (2011) Racismo de clase. El Espectador. 7 October

González Bustelo, M. (2004). ‘Appendix’. In A. Molano, Forced displacement in Colombia. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Minority Rights Group International. World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples. Retrieved June 5, 2012, from http://www.minorityrights.org/5373/colombia/afrocolombians.html

Lopéz Hernández, C. (ed.) (2009). Y refundaron la patria… De cómo mafiosos y políticos reconfiguraron el Estado colombiano. Bogotá: Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris.

Perlman, J. (1976). The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pont, V. (2012). Ricos y desiguales. Retrieved October 30, 2012, from Dejusticia: http://dejusticia.org/index.php?modo=interna&tema=antidiscriminacion&publicacion=1064

Ramírez, M. (2001). Entre el estado y la guerrilla: identidad y ciudadanía en el movimiento de los campesinos cocaleros del Putumayo. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Colciencias.

Richani, N. (2002). Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia. New York: State University of New York Press.

Rojas Ferro, C. (1995). The ‘will to civilization’ and its encounter with laissez-faire. International Political Economy, 2 (1), 150-183.

Rosero Antonio, E. El derecho a no ser discriminado: Primer informe sobre discriminación racial y derechos de la población afrocolombiana. Bogotá, D.C.: Banco de la República.

Serje, M. (2005). El Revés De La Nación: Territorios Salvajes, Fronteras y Tierras De Nadie. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes.

Springer, S. (2012). Neoliberalism as discourse: between Foucauldian political economy and Marxian poststructuralism. Critical Discourse Studies , 9 (2), 133-147.

Wade, P. (1993). Region, Race, Ethnicity and Social Inequality in Colombia. Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change , 15, 113-138.

Williams Castro, F. (2013). Afro-Colombians and the Cosmopolitan City : New Negotiations of Race and Space in Bogotá, Colombia. Latin American Perspectives , 40 (105), 105-117.

Medicine in black and white

The woman was a refugee from Eritrea. Stated age: 26. Supposedly 6 months pregnant. The old doctor looked over her file. A few lost pregnancies. One birth. He began talking to us in English. He assumed she couldn’t possibly understand that. “These people need contraception, look…” and I automatically tuned him out. I couldn’t handle the tirade. I heard it the last time we saw a female patient together. Interestingly there are very few at this charitable clinic. The only one in the world I have ever seen where men outnumber women about 5 to 1. The reasons are simple I suppose. Death or kidnapping to the bedouins. Profit hungry pimps they were sold to calculate a trip to the doctor as a loss…but I’m not sure about that.

My father used to call prostitution white slavery…and I must note anywhere in the world I have been, Caucasians seem over-represented in those poor women. It can’t possibly be the actual case…but, they are the ones out on display I suppose, and perhaps in the back room various women are available. Perhaps black women are heavily discounted. I imagine myself wearing a sign that says “50% off.” It seems pretty awful. I suppose I should stick to medicine. My train of thought is interrupted by a dramatic climax in volume and anger from the doctor. “And this, this,” he points to the 3 year old on the floor, “this is the end result!”

I look down and notice a small child with big brown eyes, and playful energy. He is perhaps the cutest kid I have ever seen . He was the kind of kid that gives any woman with a pulse childbearing or kidnapping fantasies. Old doctors can get away with anything. They are the smartest person in the room, or so everyone assumes. Years of experience have imprinted their brains with the facts of medicine no matter how obscure. Since they ask the questions, they know the answers.

I remember years ago, it was actually young doctor who burned that into my psyche. Although he didn’t know it, he was exactly my age. I was late to start medical school. It took me years to realize I had no hope as an artist. But I am black, so perhaps he thought I was younger than him. At least I hope given that he told me I “did not understand how to relate to people superior to” me and this was my main problem. Perhaps condescension was just a defense mechanism after we had a scuffle about one of his patients. I didn’t appreciate his ‘education’ of me after her visit; but mostly I feared for her--a poor black teenager with one child who he refused to give contraception. When I asked why, he told me about what would be best for her: total abstinence. 

I pointed out that offering contraception was not telling her to have sex, and that probably she was sexually active anyways considering she had a child. He reacted by kicking me out of the Pediatrics course, which he was in charge of. Theoretically without his approval I would be literally unable to finish medical school. It was one of my last experiences with medicine in the US. I packed my bags before I even finished medical school there. I have often thought of writing that doctor, just to let him know I eventually entered his cherished important profession, also became a medical doctor, and wonder if he would still say he was “superior” to me.

At what point I get awarded equality, I am totally unsure. I know I have not reached it. I could tell by the total disgust on the face of one of my mentors when I mentioned I wanted a child, soon. “How are you going to pay for this kid?” he asked. The question was ironic considering I worked more or less for him, as he was directly above me in the intellectually constructed pyramid of doctors. He was right, I was a bottom brick.  Just a few years out of medical school. How dare I, a lowly doctor of even lowlier origins think of having a child…'right, because kids are only for rich white folks like yourself,' I felt like saying.

Candace Makeda H. Moore, MD

Researching Race While Being Raced: Reflections on Race Politics in Anthropology

Let’s have an honest discussion about Race in Anthropology. As a non-white anthropologist who conducts research on issues of race, racism, class, nationalism, citizenship, and belonging I find that frank discussions on race and racism within the discipline of anthropology, between the majority and the minority, are few and far between. While many can acknowledge that there is in fact racism in the world, and that the concept of race does have some impact on the lives of those who are raced, I have come to notice that many within the field are more reluctant to talk about the ways in which race influences their perceptions on who has the “right” to conduct certain types of research on the topics of race and racism. As Elizabeth Chin (2006) succulently said, the unwritten rule within the discipline is “people of color study themselves, white people study everybody.” (44)

I came face-to-face with this assumption throughout my doctorate as I began to examine the intersections of race, citizenship, and nation in the UK. My initial interests in the UK stemmed from a desire to theoretically and practically engage with the concepts of race and racism outside of an American race paradigm. Of particular interest to me were the emerging debates around mixed-race identity and mixedness (Cabellero forthcoming; Ifekwunigwe 1998; Edwards et. al, 2012) in relation to Britishness (Gilroy 2002; Goulbourne 2009; Meer 2010; Modood 2007). As I applied for funding for this topic I was met with reviewers commenting not on what I proposed I wanted to do, but what I should be looking at for a dissertation. Where I stated I wanted to work with mixed-race organizations in London or Bristol, I was met with comments that suggested this was a futile pursuit and instead I would be “better off” working within African-Caribbean or South East Asian populations. After a number of rounds of going through these types of comments with various funders I decided to change my population to racial and ethnic minorities in general. I was immediately funded.

Once in the field I faced more challenges over my research. I worked with a Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) civil society regional organization in Bristol, England for two years, examining the ways in which racial and ethnic identity was used as a political platform for BME communities to engage with the state. The term “BME” encompasses a large heterogeneous population of ethnic minorities in the UK – from Irish traveller populations to refugee populations from Eastern Europe and East Africa, to those with roots in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. This complicated and complex construction of racial and ethnic minority populations is rooted in a specific historical and geographical context unique to the UK. As someone who was interested in the intersections of race and nation, the UK offered an interesting contextualization of these issues.

Yet, when I expressed this sentiment to fellow anthropologist I was met with perplexed looks and interesting questions. “Are you British?” was the most common one, implying that my personal national/ethnic/racial identity must be the main deciding factor in my decision making process of selecting a dissertation topic and field site. When I would respond with a “no” then other questions followed that further delved into someone trying to find that personal identity attachment to my research. Instead of seeing me as another researcher who worked on political anthropological topics, I was seen as a mixed-race/brown/black anthropologist who focused on issues that related to my own identity. This is what Steele (2010) calls identity contingencies – “the things you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given social identity.” (3) I found throughout my time in the academia I have had to deal with being a non-white researcher who does race research, and having that research examined by others through my own racial identity and not the research itself. And that is what I call a problem.

This problem stems back to the original quote I used from Elizabeth Chin. In that simple statement the issues of race politics within anthropology emerge. The “legitimacy” of race research seems to depend upon the perceived racial/ethnic identity of the researcher – when that researcher is non-white. If it did not then other anthropologists would not have questioned my personal nationality repeatedly throughout my fieldwork experience as I unraveled the tangled intersections of race, nation, and citizenship. If it did not then those asking me the questions would have turned those same questions onto themselves to uncover why they, as white researchers, chose to go to Sub-Sahara Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, etc… to conduct research on a number of different issues.

This is not new – many have written about this phenomenon in different aspects (see Bulmer and Solomos’ edited volume 2004; Duster 1999; Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997; Mullings 2005; Harrison 1998; Rhodes 1994; Smedley and Smedley 2012 to name a small few). So then what can we do about this now? For me the simplest solution is to start having frank conversations amongst one another on the politics of race within anthropology. By this I do not mean renting a small room at the next AAA meeting and that room being full of only non-white faces speaking about these issues. This has been done in the past, and it ends up being minorities speaking to other minorities. This is not only a minority issue. Instead the majority needs to be apart of this discussion, and not making the discussion. We need real conversations between the majority and the minority so that the stereotypes and prejudices that we all have can be brought to the forefront and worked on in order to advance the research done on race and racism within the field.

Essentially race is complicated, uncomfortable, and elicits an emotional state for both those who are raced and those who do the racing (Caballero forthcoming). But, if we wish to educate the public about race and race politics then we need to start talking about race politics within our own discipline, and the impact this has on the perception of who can do what types of research on race.

Nicole Truesdell, PhD

Director McNair Scholars Program

Adjunct Assistant Professor in Anthropology

Beloit College

References

Bulmer, Martin and John Solomos. 2004. Researching Race and Racism. New York. Routledge. Caballero, Chamion. Forthcoming. Mixed Emotions: reflections on researching racial mixing and mixedness. Emotion, Space and Society.

Chin, Elizabeth. 2006. Confessions of a Negrophile. Transforming Anthropology 14(1): 44-52.

Duster, Troy. 1999. Foreword in, Racing research, researching race: methodological dilemmas in critical race. pp. xi-xiv. France Winddance Twine and Jonathan W. Warren, eds. New York. New York University Press.

Edwards, Rosalind, Suki Ali, Chamion Caballero and Miri Song. 2012. International Perspectives on Mixing and Mixedness. London. Routledge.

Harrison, Faye V. 1998. Introduction: Expanding the Discourse on “Race.” 100(3): 609-638.

Gilroy, Paul. 2002. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London. Routledge.

Goulbourne, Harry. 2009. Ethnicity and Nationalism in post-imperial Britain. New York. Cambridge University Press. Ifekwunigwe, Jayne. 1998. Scattered Belongings. London. Routledge.

Meer, Nasar. 2010. Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism. London. Palgrave MacMillian. Modood, Tariq. 2007 Multiculturalism. A Civic Idea. Cambridge. Polity.

Mukopadhyay, Carol C and Yolanda T. Moses. 1997. Reestablishing “Race” in Anthropological Discourse. American Anthropologist 99(3): 517-533.

Mullings, Leith. 2005. Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology. Annual Review Of Anthropology 34: 667-693. Rhodes, P.J. 1994. Race-Of-Interviewer Effects: A Brief Comment. Sociology. 28(2):547-558.

Smedley, Audrey and Brian a. Smedley. 2012. Race in North American. Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (4th Edition). Boulder. Westview Press.

Steele, Claude E. 2010. Whistling Vivaldi. New York. W.W. Norton and Company.

Race and the public perception of anthropology

Anthropologists have dedicated much time to deconstructing and denouncing racial myths (see, for example, the AAA's statement on race from 1998) and, as a result, the idea that "race does not exist" has been as strongly absorbed into the anthropological canon as cultural relativism. More recently, collaboration between social and physical anthropologists reaffirms that race is "not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation" (Edgar and Hunley 2009: 2) while scientifically detailing the genetic evidence for actual human variation. Still, dismissing fixed racial categorization as biologically unsubstantiated has done little to eradicate the very real presence of race in everyday life. So what has all the effort we have spent in deconstructing race actually achieved?

Teaching race

In Race Reconciled?, Edgar and Hunley address one of the main concerns I will concentrate on here; namely, how preconceived notions of race present a challenge for educators:

Specialists in informal education talk about "naïve notions," which, in the context of education in biological anthropology, are the ideas our students have when they walk in the doors of our classrooms. Often, these ideas are typological, even when they are not racist. Although we have now been teaching for generations that races do not exist, these naïve notions persist and they continue to have social and scientific consequences. This may be because we have failed to offer a clear and satisfactory explanation that meshes with students' lived experience (2009: 3).

Is it possible that the idea that races do not exist is itself becoming a "naïve notion" within anthropology?

Anyone who has taught subjects like race or ethnicity knows that class discussions can easily stir up intense emotions and indeed no small amount of confusion. My students, for instance, have been woefully under-prepared to discuss race beyond the idea that perceptions of racial boundaries are culturally constructed and that racial stereotyping is wrong. Past that, they are unsure of how to critically analyze race, power, politics, etc, without feeling as if they are stepping into a trap. Having said that, I taught in the UK, where most of my majority white, British students tellingly saw race and racism as distinctly American problems. Of course, this is certainly not the case, which highlights another complication regarding how to deal with race in anthropology as a project of global education.

There is apparently an all-too-common problem with the way our students perceive race based on how the standard textbook definition is framed. At Living Anthropologically, Jason Antrosio notes a similar phenomenon in his classes; namely, that his students "are very likely to conclude the anthropological critique of race supports their own desire to be 'colorblind'". Anthropologist Angela VandenBroek likewise has to explain to her students how,

despite the fact that race is socially constructed and that true color-blindness would be wonderful […] racism exists as a fundamental thread that permeates every context of everyday life. So, to approach any situation from a 'color-blind' stance denies the reality of the lived experience of racism and thus exacerbates the problem more than it solves it.

Both of these statements are from Antrosio's excellent post Anthropology on Race.

These types of misunderstandings are a good clue that more progress needs to be made in contextualizing what is meant by "race is a social construct". Accordingly, advancing the race debate in anthropology today is the argument for the recognition of privilege and its role in racial politics. This is actually not so new. The AAA statement from 1998 acknowledges that the common "'racial' worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth". Nevertheless, calls are rightfully being made for increased attention to whiteness and white privilege in order to update popular anthropological notions of race to more adequately reflect its cultural, political and historical underpinnings.

What I want to explore in admittedly loose terms here is what kind of impact this shift in discourse is having on public perception of race and anthropology including among our own undergraduates. Perceptions of race among students of the social sciences are important not just for anthropology, but for future social and public policy everywhere. It is therefore important to address privilege in a way that both better informs students and offers a more nuanced discussion of race which is not simply a blanket rejection of the well-worn slogan "race doesn't exist" in favor of "race is everything".

Check your privilege

Social media is an influential platform for the dissemination of ideas about race that produces new and unexpected challenges for contemporary education in anthropology. Last year, one particular online social drama surrounding anthropology and race earned public internet notoriety when a former Disney child actor-turned-undergraduate anthropologist clashed with militant social justice bloggers – including more anthropology students – over race and white privilege on the microblogging platform Tumblr1. The controversy began when the white, teen male took offense at the post of a 19-year-old African American female who asserted that "white boys that are students of anthropology are usually not not2 students of anthropology. They're just assholes" and tagged it with the star's name.

Such an opinion itself is pretty telling of anthropology's public historical legacy and inadvertent self-sabotage regarding race. I estimate that undergraduates make up a good majority of the vocal anthropologists on the site and they were certainly active in joining both sides of the ensuing debate. Some participants agreed that the white actor was ignorant for daring to study the subject at all since anthropology itself was built upon white privilege. Others came to his defense only to then receive vicarious assaults against their ignorance, whiteness or complicity with privileged whites. More readers and contributors matter-of-factly acknowledged anthropology's own racist past as justification for labeling white anthropologists "assholes" without hesitation.

Why ruminate about a Disney kid and the social psychology of Tumblr? As academics write at length for solutions to better understanding race, anthropology's public image is anything but in line with our own contemporary studies. Our cumulative body of knowledge and recent works in this area are strong, but there is a noticeable gap between the science and its popular perception that – whether we like it or not – falls on us to rectify. At the same time, anthropology students are up against increased pressures to make what they learn in class fit with what they experience in life.

Militant social activism is somewhat of a proud tradition in the Tumblr community, and to their credit participants in this public drama did, in fact, display an understanding of race that moves beyond skin tone to address deeply embedded social, economic and political inequalities. But what struck me when scrolling through bloggers' responses was the number of times check-your-privilege advocates began sentences with "you're white, so what you say/think about race (or insert any other topic here) doesn't count". Rather than enabling a productive recognition of privilege, this type of assertion just as easily stifles debate, learning and progress by instilling fear and forcing people onto opposed sides of a renewed and self-perpetuating battle of skin tones.

Finally, one particularly troubling avowal of support for the actor-student was this comment from an exasperated user (italics added): "dear lord. please don't even try to bring race into anthropology. ANTHROPOLOGISTS BELIEVE RACE TO BE A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, NOT FACT." And we're right back where we started.

Communicating race

While anthropology's role as broker in race and racial politics remains more or less secure, what needs critical attention is how we communicate race and the new and old baggage that it carries. How do we affect the national (US) and global conversation on race without explaining it away and likewise without enabling the co-opting of anthropological truths for justifying blind hatred? At the same time, it is essential not to take American experiences of race for granted as universal. Commentators from the US are quick to dismiss the reality of lives elsewhere or even cling to their own ignorance of what it is like in other places, thereby feeding into the muddled confusion that arises when forcing others to conform to a specifically American historical paradigm.

Socio-cultural anthropologists should not let the opportunity to correct public perceptions of race slip through our disciplinary fingers and expect the biologists and geneticists among us to take up the slack. A fumbling stance on race that is out of touch with reality or in itself inherently racist will simply feed into vicious cycles of blame, not to mention cause mystification when people turn to anthropology to make sense of it all. Worse still, if we cannot correct our negative image, they may not turn to us at all.

Francine Barone

Research Associate, University of Kent

Notes

1. The entire archive of posts can be found here.

2. The repetition of "not" exists in original text, but is probably a typo.

References

Edgar, H. J. H. & K. L. Hunley 2009. "Race reconciled?: How biological anthropologists view human variation". American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139: 1–4.