At the end of my sixth semester as an anthropology professor, I’m reflecting on what it means to inhabit this discipline (or, maybe, to occupy (re-occupy?) it). I have spent the better part of the last 8 years immersed in anthropological theory, anthropological politics, and engaging and interlocuting with the ghosts of the discipline’s past. And, to be honest, this work wears away at my cells, my fibres, my bones. I’m exhausted.

I have aged. I recently joked in a talk to a room full of bright, enthusiastic Métis students at a conference here in Ottawa that when I started my tenure-track position three years ago, I looked like I was twelve years old. And now I look like I’m twenty. (The women in my family age very well).

All jokes aside, though, the work of embodying the discipline, of disciplining myself into the structures of not only the academy, but the specificities of anthro itself, wear and tear at my Indigenous body. I paused the other day to ask myself if any of the last 8 years in anthro have brought me joy.

I cannot say that they have.

To propel myself forward within the discipline, to deflect the various forms of daily violence I experience within it as an Indigenous woman, I keep working towards the next step, the next goal, hoping that behind each successive door there might be something about anthro that brings me joy. If not passing my proposal defence, then surely the viva voce. If not the viva voce, then surely the feeling of graduating in absentia. If not the absentia graduation, then surely presenting at x,y,z conference or publishing in x,y,z venue. If not all of these things, then surely the satisfaction of tenure in a few years’ time will provide that joy or at least sense of meaning or belonging.

But what keeps creeping in throughout this punishing marathon of seeking external validation from anthropology is that I find joy elsewhere. Publishing in, and speaking at, critical art history venues. Collaborating with art historians, geographers, artists, and Indigenous/feminist STS scholars. Sneaking in my own artwork and poetry and references to popular TV shows into serious academic contributions. Working with other Indigenous feminist scholars to examine, in great detail, the experiences of our communities and our ancestors. Everything that brings me joy is outside anthropology. So why do I continue to call myself an anthropologist? (and do I?)

Disciplines discipline. They police boundaries and they seek to convene specific discourses. As a teenager, I once dreamt of joining the military, and through my adolescent years as an Army Cadet in Canada, I grew to love discipline. I loved the predictability of it, the reward of meeting a goal within the rubrics of military training. I loved running with our cadet company or platoons, I loved the camouflage, the drills, the routinized expectations. All of it. It gave me a sense of purpose, comfort. I was very good at discipline. I could take it, and I could mete it out.

But the thing with finding yourself through discipline, through routinization, through external rewards and punishment, is that at some point — for some folks — there is a limit to what the institution can offer you. A limit to discipline (a disciplinary limit).

At this point, when you have exhausted your utility to an institution or structure, and when the institution has exhausted its usefulness to you: you must make a choice. When your body exceeds the limits of the body of work you contribute to, what do you become? Waste? Collateral damage? Disciplines do not like unruly bodies or bodies that permeate and puncture the walls of their cells.

Disciplines are macrophages, seeking like and familiar. When your protein coating does not read as familiar to the institution’s immune system, when you are unfamiliar, you are ingested, broken down, and excreted as waste.

Eight years in: I feel like waste. And as life imitates art, my own immune system and other bodily systems are overrun with the markers of waste typical of a body that has been forced to circulate toxic, life-threatening levels of cortisol and other stress hormones for far too long.

Either we find a way for our bodies to assimilate to the pressures of the structures we occupy, or our bodies turn that pressure inwards, slowly destroying the structures that keep us standing.

I read Sara Ahmed’s work to help keep me afloat on the tenure track. Her words give me buoyancy but they also give me ballast. Her theorizations of what it is for Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) scholars to occupy academe are important documentations of the ways disciplines discipline.  She also articulates, with laser precision, what it means for BIPOC scholars to speak up and to name problems within the academy, within disciplines. To speak up, to defy convention and the disciplining of disciplines is to become ‘problems’ within the university and within broader fields of study (Ahmed 2014). As Ahmed notes regarding sexism in the academy:

 “When [we] point out these structures, we become sore points, because you are pointing out something that gets in the way of how people occupy space. Note as well: when you point out sexism, you are often blocked. The message does not get through. In my work I have  called these blockages “walls” (Ahmed 2012). In the academy, I come across the walls of sexism every day: whether through citational practices that repeatedly privilege work by men (particularly when it comes to defining a new field or object of study, feminist work that leads to field formation often disappears once a field is given form); whether it is how women who are not willing to participate in sexual banter get called “uptight,” whether it is in the  expectation of who the lecturers are, of how they appear; whether it is in the constant stream of questions asked to female academics about how their work relates to this or that male theorist.” (Ahmed 2014)

This same process applies to speaking up about racism, white supremacy, and colonialism in anthropology. Thinking with Ahmed’s work, it is clear to me that to name the violences of anthropology, to speak of them, and to refuse their relegation to the ‘bad past’ separate from the ‘good present’, is to become a problem. Further, when you work in ways that confound disciplinary boundaries, you become a problem. When your body, and your body of work, do not fit neatly into the categories provided, you become a problem.

Achille Mbembe (2015: 19) articulates a desire to provincialize European thought (in reference to the work of Fanon) by enacting his specific vision of the pluriversity. He explains (2015: 19):

“By pluriversity, many understand a process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity.  It is a process that does not necessarily abandon the notion of universal knowledge for humanity, but which embraces it via a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions. To decolonize the university is therefore to reform it with the aim of creating a less provincial and more open critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism – a task that involves the radical re-founding of our ways of thinking and a transcendence of our disciplinary divisions. The problem of course is whether the university is reformable or whether it is too late.” (Mbembe 2015: 19)

What does epistemic diversity look like when we are tangling with a euro-western academy that meticulously tags and monitors us as problems? And is the discipline of anthropology reformable, as Mbembe asks of the university more broadly, or are we indeed ‘too late’?

I am not sure.

So, I turn to stories to tease out what is happening and what might be possible.

Over the last year, I have been interlocuting with a Black anthropologist who has dealt with egregious levels of antiblack racism in the discipline, and who has spent the better part of the last decade raising concerns about this through all the means available to them. And I have watched as anthropologists dismiss this individual as a ‘problem’. I have tried to figure out how I reconcile the work anthropologists claim to do to dismantle racism while I see it faithfully and viciously reproduced in every aspect of the discipline. I am trying to figure out how I counteract the surveillance and disciplining of our discipline while also making sure I stay alive, while I make sure the pressure doesn’t kill me. How do I, to borrow a term from Simpson’s (2007, 2014) work, refuse anthro’s underlying white supremacist tendencies?

I acknowledge that as a white-coded Indigenous woman, I possess a great deal of privilege. So, if I am feeling ground to nothing in anthropology — and I inhabit this Indigenous body that is read as white and is not subjected to the same racist surveillance and everyday violence as racialized bodies — then what levels of care and support can I hope for for my racialized students in the discipline? If I can barely survive the micro-aggressions against me as a white-coded Indigenous woman over the last 8 years, then what can I possibly hope for for BIPOC students?

I do my best to fight for the safety of BIPOC students, and to assert that nobody’s humanity is up for debate in my classroom. But I cannot guarantee the broader discipline or academy will offer this level of care. It feels unethical to try and recruit students into a discipline that I know to be violent, to a discipline that I know excuses a great deal of racism in its everyday operations. So I have not tried.

Instead, I am moving half of my appointment to an Indigenous Studies program, where I feel I can ethically supervise students and protect them from the worst of the violences I’ve faced as an Indigenous woman in anthropology in European, American, and Canadian contexts. (I am not naive, though. All disciplines discipline in various ways. It is a matter of finding the ones within which you can actually breathe, if possible).

It fascinates me that disciplines also quibble over the things that don’t matter when they could expend that energy actually transforming their fields into spaces that are inclusive and dynamic. I have had the relatively hilarious recent experience of defending my work to both anthropologists and sociologists. I hold graduate degrees in both disciplines. Some folks in both disciplines remain suspicious of my intentions. When I speak to some anthros, they are suspicious of my embrace of sociological theorists and principles. When I speak to some sociologists, I am a trojan horse, bringing my unruly embrace of ethnography and epistemic diversity (Mbembe 2015) into the neat and orderly world of ANOVA tests and quantitative measurement. The thing is, both disciplines are still rooted in white supremacist logics and histories. Both disciplines discipline. Both disciplines have more in common with one another than they care to admit. Their roots in euro-western cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemes hold them much more closely together on the tree of euro-western intellectual life than they realize. 

And based on my experience — and that of myriad colleagues and students who have shared harrowing stories over the years — both disciplines are still, largely, hostile space for Indigenous scholars here in North America.

Dr. Audra Simpson opens the fourth chapter of her seminal ethnography Mohawk Interruptus with the following statement: “to speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes are still known” (Simpson 2014). What I learn from Simpson’s work, and from my own informal ethnographic study of the discipline, is that to speak of Indigeneity within anthropology is to navigate erasure of Indigenous agency, sovereignty, and self-determination (in all of their pluralities and complexities) — and to confront disciplinary conventions that frame Indigenous peoples in very specific ways. Ways that pose us alternately as cherished, noble informants (outside the academy), or nasty and brutish problems (within the discipline).

At a job interview (outside of anthro), a senior white male scholar approaching retirement leveraged this complaint against me: “where is the social theory in your work? You don’t seem to use any social theory!”. As a sociologist, he could not read my citations of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Kim TallBear, Leroy Little Bear, Audra Simpson, Val Napoleon, John Borrows, my Aunt (Métis-Cree filmmaker Loretta Todd) as ‘social theory’. When this question was posed to me, I knew it spelled doom for me and this particular job opportunity. So I gathered up my Michif stubborness, took a deep breath, and offered this back to the interrogator:

“What if I asked you this question: you demand to know where the social theory is in my work as an Indigenous feminist scholar. I suppose my question back to you is: what has your discipline (sociology) done to deserve the presence of Indigenous feminist scholars within it, to be worthy of my social theory?”

I did not get the job.

Back to the joke-filled talk I delivered in front of the hotel banquet hall full of Métis students last month. In that moment, I felt joy. I did not have to defend my right to be there, to occupy that space discussing my work on Métis law, fish, and extinction in the Canadian prairies. I did not have to self-consciously cite obscure anthropological theory to prove my worthiness to be in that space. I told stories rooted in my place as a Métis woman borne of the Lake Winnipeg watershed. I cited the legal traditions that influence our governance, I talked about our theories and cosmologies. I cited myriad BIPOC women scholars, I talked about what it is like to do anti-colonial work in the spirit of building something otherwise. Later, colleagues asked pointed but thoughtful questions about my work — in ways that hold me accountable to the community I write about and belong to.

So what does it look like for us to engage more epistemic diversity, to be more generous and generative with the work that we do, with the bodies (human and figurative) that we carry within our disciplinary walls? I am not sure.

I think the biggest hurdle to embracing epistemic diversity in anthropology, to dismantling its current configuration as ‘white public space’ (Brodkin et al. 2011) is admitting the white supremacist roots of the discipline. To stop saying that anthropology ‘decolonized’ itself with the decolonial turn 30 years ago. Decolonization is a process, not a destination. You cannot declare you’ve arrived somewhere if you’ve barely even strapped on the seat-belts and delivered the safety lecture.

In Canada, the lives of Indigenous people are statistically shorter than the lives of non-Indigenous people . First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women can also expect to experience violence at 2.7 times the rate of non-Indigenous women. The categories employed here are also problematic — because the inter-related violences of the State against Indigenous, African-descended, and Afro-Indigenous communities are built into the DNA of the country. The above data are the statistics for Indigenous women, and statistics for African-descended and Afro-Indigenous communities and individuals are equally distressing: the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner recently completed a study of anti-Black racism in Canada that raises very specific concerns about violence against African-descended peoples in the Country. Despite appearances to being a liberal haven, Canada still turns on the logics of white supremacy and colonialism, and these realities permeate every institution, including our universities and academic disciplines.

So, as a Métis woman, I can expect to live at least three years less than a non-Indigenous Canadian woman, and I am 2.7 times more likely to experience serious violence in my life. With this statistically shorter life, and statistically higher likelihood of experiencing violence, I seek the right to inhabit those spaces that celebrate and nurture and uplift me.

Anthro: you have not been that space.

So, to cite the classic song by Tracy Chapman: give me one reason to stay here. I can’t promise I’ll turn right back around, though. Because I have found joy in so many other places within and beyond academe, and I am not sure the disciplining discipline of anthro can offer me anything at the moment that would draw me away from living a resolutely, stubbornly joy-full and meaningful life beyond its halls.

Works Cited:

Brodkin, Karen, Morgen, Sandra and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. ‘Anthropology as White Public Space?’, American Anthropologist 113(4): 545–556.

Mbembe, Achille. 2015. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.” Lecture. May 2, 2015 at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Retrieved October 05, 2016. (http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf).

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67-80.

Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

zoetodd

Dr. Zoe Todd (Red River Métis) (she/they) is a practice-led artist-researcher who studies the relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures in Canada. As a Métis anthropologist and researcher-artist, Dr. Todd combines dynamic social science and humanities research and research-creation approaches—including ethnography, archival research, oral testimony, and experimental artistic research practices—within a framework of Indigenous philosophy to elucidate new ways to study and support the complex relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish well-being in Canada today. They are a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures, which is a collaborative Indigenous-led initiative that is ‘restor(y)ing fish futures, together’ across three continents. They are also a co-founder of the Indigenous Environmental Knowledge Institute (IEKI) at Carleton University. In 2020 they were elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, and in 2018 were the Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

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[The following essay emerges from conversation with fellow PhD student and AES/SVA attendee, Scott Ross (George Washington University).]

How is it that a senior anthropologist used the n-word during a plenary lecture and no one is talking about it?

At last month’s American Ethnological Society Spring Conference in Philadelphia, Sherry Ortner delivered one of three keynote lectures, titled “Documenting Newark: Violent Resemblances.” Whereas much of Ortner’s work during the past two decades has focused on conceptualizing and theorizing class in anthropology—famously based on her ethnographic research among her mostly White, Jewish high school classmates in Newark, New Jersey—in this paper Ortner shifted her attention to questions of race, patriarchy, and policing in the city. Drawing from old police records and other archival texts from the 1960s and 1970s, in this work-in-progress, Ortner invokes Mary Douglas’ notion of purity and danger as framework for theorizing police violence. In this formulation, the able-bodied, heterosexual, cis-gendered White male becomes the standard-bearer for purity in the United States; and in relation all those who are not are effectively “impure” others. Extending this analogy to the police forces, Ortner argues that mostly male, mostly White police forces constitute a patriarchal organization that employs violence against women, Black and other People of Color, LGBTQ people and folks with disabilities to uphold this binary between purity and impurity.

This lecture, given at a conference organized around the theme of “Resemblances” was strange and unsettling for several reasons. Ortner’s theorizations centered primarily on the work of Mary Douglas, and secondarily on Didier Fassin’s writing about policing in urban France. In other words, in a lecture about race, policing, and patriarchy, in mid-twentieth century Newark and by extension implicitly about the current milieu of police violence against Black men and women, Ortner—a White woman—did not cite a single Black scholar, and seemed altogether ignorant of intersectional feminist scholarship. During the post-lecture Q&A an audience member asked Ortner how she thought class might play into this, given her decades-long work in this subject matter. Interestingly, Ortner did not quite have an answer and admitted that all of the possibilities were overwhelming her. If Ortner had looked towards Black women anthropologists like Ruha Benjamin, Kia Caldwell, Keisha-Khan Perry, Christen Smith, Dana Ain-Davis, Bianca C. Williams, Erica Williams—who have written about these issues and even working alongside activists demanding accountability for racialized and gendered police violence in the US and across the globe—this line of inquiry might have come together more convincingly. These politics of citation are not to be underemphasized. Feminist philosopher Sarah Ahmed (2013) describes citation “as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way to reproduce the world around certain bodies.” Failing to cite Black scholars when we talk about the police brutality that disproportionately affects Black people in the United States reproduces, and indeed calcifies, the notion that White bodies and ideas remain at the center of our discipline, the academy, and public intellectual discourse.

The absence of Black scholarship in this paper became doubly disconcerting when Ortner made the choice to say the n-word in its entirety while reading from archival documents—especially when it seems as if one of Ortner’s key points was that racist name-calling serves to articulate and reify the “pollution logic” behind racist violence. Even more strangely, the audience seemed unphased by Ortner’s use of the racial slur; and while many of us graduate students whispered about the talk in hushed tones afterwards, the silence from more senior scholars—many among them our mentors and role models—was deafening. No one questioned her about this choice. Ortner did forewarn and apologized again after reading the document, but neither these indicators nor the fact that she was reading from an archival document absolve Ortner of responsibility for the racial violence inflicted through her choices. In a talk about the different forms of violence done to black bodies, it was unsettling to hear these violences redeployed under the guise of analysis.

This year’s meeting—a joint conference between AES and the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA)—was organized around the theme of “Resemblances,” around the questions: “In an era of ‘fake news’ and ‘alt’ political movements, what counts as meaning making?” and “How can we understand epistemology in an era of madness?” Sherry Ortner’s plenary lecture was bookended by two other keynote addresses featuring scholars of color including professors Kamala Visweswaran, Elizabeth Chin, and John Jackson as well as welcoming remarks from Reverend John Norwood of the Nanticoke, Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation. The block of panels immediately following Ortner’s keynote included a roundtable conversation on social justice in anthropology, in which scholars drew attention to the inequities of academe, the forms of gendered and racial exclusion in American higher education, and strategies for pursuing social justice in our research and in our workplaces. . Ostensibly, the conference expressed an ethos of political solidarity beyond the scheduled panels and papers. This included a “Solidarity Lunch” for graduate students of color, Indigenous students, women, LGBTQ students, and students with disabilities; AES even purchased $2000 worth of t-shirts from the March for Our Lives movement in a show of support for the nation-wide marches and rallies that took place in cities across the country, including Philadelphia, on March 24.

Of my own silence in the moment, which I now deeply regret, I will say that as a graduate student and person of color it somehow seemed indecorous to question one of anthropology’s most revered scholars on her use of racialized slurs. The final keynote address featured a presentation by Elizabeth Chin and response from John Jackson about anthropology, race, and multi-modality. Among several other poignant comments, Jackson reminded us of W.E.B. DuBois, who asked fellow Black Americans, “how does it feel to be a problem?”

Race, along with other kinds of Othering, are still a problem in anthropology, regardless of whether we like to acknowledge it, and the people who feel it most are the ones most marginalized within the discipline. Anthropology undergraduate and graduate students learn its paradigms from our advisors and mentors. The Othering tendencies of anthropological inquiry continues to be centered in the canons of many programs and in our disciplinary discourse more broadly. In their scholarly interest, questions about race and marginality, and the continued marginalization of scholars of color as graduate students, faculty, and intellectuals, we have witnessed that our discipline is not as steadfast as it is ambivalently obsessed with racial justice.

The AES conference this year took place just days after a domestic terrorist set off a series of bombs that killed and injured Black and Latino residents outside of Austin, Texas, and Sacramento police officers shot an unarmed Black man eight times while he stood in his grandmother’s backyard. Violence against People of Color is not only a historical, but also a contemporary reality. Anthropologists must address, analyze, and talk about such very real problems as white supremacy in better ways. In February of this year, an anthropology professor at Princeton University was forced to cancel a course on hate speech after he used the n-word. The call for Professor Lawrence Rosen to cancel the course did not come from the Princeton University administration or from the anthropology department. In fact, the chair of the department and the university spokesperson remained steadfast in their support of Rosen and “his right to free speech.” While such a right may exist, we should be committed to ethical speech, the language of solidarity, and holding each other accountable for the violences we reinscribe on others. We should be purposeful rather than provocative in our teaching. In March, thirteen professors of anthropology, along with more than 50 other scientists and researchers, composed and signed an open letter to geneticist David Reich critiquing his conceptualization of race as a biological human category. How we talk about race can and does feed into ongoing processes of white supremacy regardless of intent. We must actively work to refuse such violences. Next year’s AES meetings will be held in St. Louis, Missouri, where conference organizers have the opportunity to move beyond merely gesturing towards solidarities by centering the voices and work of Black scholars, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Black resistance.

Language matters. If “Resemblances” sought to ask questions about what we are supposed to do, and how we are supposed to think, in times like these, we must keep in mind that the choices we make around language and representation are fundamental to our disciplinary epistemology.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sarah. 2013. Making Feminist Points. feministkilljoys.  September 11, 2013. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/.

BuzzFeed Contributor. 2018. Opinion: How Not to Talk About Race and Genetics. BuzzFeed. March 30. https://www.buzzfeed.com/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich?utm_term=.okrNn1OJ9l#.ln9xX6879Q

da Col, Giovanni, Claudio Sopranzetti, Fred Myers, Anastasia Piliavsky, John L. Jackson, Yarimar Bonilla, Adia Benton, and Paul Stoller. 2017. Why Do We Read the Classics: Ideology, Tautology, Memory. Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(3): 1-38.

Durrani, Mariam (@mariamdurrani). 2018. “Ortner emphasizes how repetitive racist name-calling brings to the surface the “pollution logic” behind racist violence. The ways that language gives a reflexive articulation of racism that dialogically echoes structural oppression and reifies its existence.” March 23, 1:50PM. https://twitter.com/mariamdurrani/status/977241217816768512.

Flaherty, Colleen. 2018. Ending a Course Over the N-Word. Inside Higher Education. February 14,. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/14/princeton-professor-who-was-criticized-using-n-word-class-hate-speech-cancels-course, accessed April 7, 2018.

Martin, Savannah. 2017. Othered by Anthropology: Being a Student of Color in Anglo-cized Academia. Savage Minds. November 3, 2017. https://savageminds.org/2017/11/03/othered-by-anthropology-being-a-student-of-color-in-anglo-cized-academia/.

Suggested Readings

(This bibliography-in-progress covers questions of race, policing, gender, and patriarchy in anthropology. It has been compiled by graduate students Anar Parikh, Scott Ross, and Dick Powis, and is on our own readings and the recommendations of our colleagues).

Antón, Susin, Ripan S. Malhi, Agustín Fuentes. 2018. Race and Diversity in US Biological Anthropology: A Decade of of AAPA initiatives. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 165: 158-180.

Baker, Lee D. 1998. From savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race 1896, 1954. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2016. Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2: 145-156.

Berry, Maya J., Chávez Argüelles, Claudia, Cordis, Shanya, Ihmoud, Sarah and Velásquez Estrada, Elizabeth. 2017. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32(4): 537–565.

Brodkin, Karen, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. “Anthropology as White Public Space?” American Anthropologist. 113 (4): 545-556.

Burton, Orisanmi. 2015. To Protect and Serve Whiteness. North American Dialogue 18(2): 38-50.

—–. 2015. “Black Lives Matter: A Critique of Anthropology.” Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, June 29, 2015. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/691-black-lives-matter-a-critique-of-anthropology

Harrison, Faye. 1995. The Persistent Power of “Race” in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 47-74.

Mullings, Leith. 2005 Interrogating Racism: Towards an Anti-Racist Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 667-693.

Navarro, Tami, Williams, Bianca C. and Ahmad, Attiya. 2013. Sitting at the Kitchen Table: Fieldnotes from Women of Color in Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology 28(3): 443–463.

Ralph, Michael et al., eds. 2016. Special Issue, “Sorrow As Artifact: Radical Black Mothering in Times of Terror.” Transforming Anthropology 24(1): 3-69.

Visweswaran, Kamala. 1998. Race and the Culture of Anthropology: American Anthropologist 100(1): 70-83)

Williams, Bianca C. “Introduction: #BlackLivesMatter.” Hot Spots. Cultural Anthropology website, June 29, 2016. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/688-introduction-blacklivesmatter

In addition to these recommended readings, you can also refer to syllabi created to teach students about Black History, civil rights, and policing using the Ferguson and Charleston syllabi, and follow the conversation about the importance of citing black women on Twitter at #citeblackwomen and @citeblackwomen.

Author: Anar Parikh is a PhD candidate at Brown University. She is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork on civic engagement, enfranchisement, and political belonging among South Asians in Chicago, Illinois. Her interests include the South Asian Diaspora, US Anthropology, citizenship, and the politics of representation.

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