The Roots of U.S. Anthropology's Race Problem: Whiteness, Ethnicity, and Ethnography

• In Event: 25.034 - Division G Vice-Presidential Session. Race(ing) Across the Disciplines: How Research in Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and Law Understands Race and Racism

Abstract

As one surveys the discipline of US anthropology from the vantage of critical race studies, one cannot help but be struck, if not confounded, by the vast wasteland that one sees. There are a few important exceptions that come to mind, which we reference below. However, as Leith Mullings’ observes, “compared to its sister disciplines of sociology and history, anthropology’s contribution to the study of racism in the last several decades has been modest” (Mullings 2005:669). This presentation offers an explanation as to why anthropologists have avoided critical race studies. US anthropologists, or at least the white ones, bring antiracist sensibilities to their profession given the culture in which they live and/or were raised. This tendency is compounded by their discipline’s analytical landscape in which race has been effectively banned by constructing it as an unscientific, folk category. The proper term to use, anthropologists are taught, is ethnicity, which is deemed to be completely discrete from race qua biology. Finally, the consideration of race hits on something bone-deep. For whites, it threatens an understanding of one’s most cherished relationships, the quality and consequences of their work, and, perhaps most importantly, the image of themselves as individuals and as good people.

Authors

• Jonathan Warren, University of Washington

• Michelle Kleisath, Shoreline Community College