Clearly, whiteness–and its privileges–matters in both Hollywood and Silicon Valley, just as I pointed out above. And it matters however much many, many anthropologists would rather not ‘discuss white privilege’.

The previous message is not intended to distract from the importance of the case you describe in your last message. I do wish that you had begun your comments with that poster you mention. If I had read something along the lines of,

“Something really disturbing happened at Berkley last year. In the Berkeley anthropology department someone put up a deeply racist–though ‘well-intenioned’–poster. That it was deeply racist was not noticed until a black anthropologist pointed out the racism. As a black woman anthropologist, I found this particularly disturbing. It reminds me of how strongly racism lingers, even in places, Berkeley and an anthropology department, where it should have been long gone.”

Notice what I’ve done here. I have personalized your story and used the setting to amplify its impact. I’m hooked and pretty sure (the professional propagandist is speaking) that others would be, too.

Follow up with those two articles to which you provided links and conclude with a strong appeal to make discussion of lingering racism and the white privilege that supports it an urgent priority for anthropologists everywhere. I would instantly have been on board. I expect that many others here would also have responded more empathetically.

in my own case, why did I respond as I usually do when I feel that someone is not only trying to lay a guilt-trip on me but is also asserting, in effect, that I should give up whatever I am doing to focus on their concerns? Sure, there could be some latent racism there. But it’s the same response that leads me in bad-tempered moments to snap at my grandkids or sagacious spouse, whom I love very much.

Another bad habit is, of course, giving unwanted advice.

>>>>

This post interested me when I first saw it, John, but I was spending a week with my family in the Swiss mountains. It goes very deep for me and I don’t really know where to stop. First, my doctoral research was based on accumulating some 70 life histories of individuals like Chris in Ghana. It never occurred to me to present my material in any other way. But later I engaged with development economists and came up with more abstract propositions like the informal economy. Between the wars, Manchester University had the only British economic history department devoted to German methods focusing on individual business case studies. After the war both the Germans and the British bought into American social science with dubious results.

I was brought up in Manchester to eschew classification as a matter of principle. Don’t think you know who someone is by the label — Jew, Catholic, Irish, whatever, I was told. Judge him on the basis of how he treats you as an individal. Probably the single most powerful text I know is the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13:

Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

I think of this as an ethnographer’s charter. Most of the time we are trapped in a sort of everyday racism, thinking we know people on a superficial basis. But just think what it would be like if we encountered them as they really are!

πίστις, ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη, the last coming to us through Latin as caritas, a superhuman love of humanity as equals, something to aspire to and indispensible to good fieldwork!

Of course words abstract from particulars and we would be hard up without language. But I do feel that lazy reliance on objectified cultural categories is a contemporary disease. Look at the abuses of profiling or the stultifying manufacture of consumer classes. Bureaucracy would be impossible without all this and in principle bureaucracy is a good thing. But…

I hate being typecast and I don’t like an ethnographic method that relies on grouping people into classes for purposes of analysis. That’s why I look to German intellectual history from the late 18th to the early 20th century. It schooled Boas, Kroeber, Lowie and their brilliant successors in American cultural anthropology. Something has gone badly wrong since then and it isn’t anthropologists who are even mainly to blame.

>>>>>>

When I asked Keith’s permission to cross-post his comment, he generously replied as follows.

>>>>>

Sure, John. I don’t like the permission culture either, but it was nice of you to ask.

I mustn’t run away again, but the key is in that much-quoted, but not well understood sentence: For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. For me this means: racism is the opaque mirror of our own twisted insecurities which we project onto others using the colour of their skin, for example, as a substitute for knowing them. How much better to get to know them as human beings, starting out from the premise that they are fundamentally like us as well as infinitely varied.

When I started out as an anthropologist, I lived with poor black people in a slum with a criminal culture. I soon found out that if I didn’t escape from the us/them stereotypes (I was a white, rich, overeducated kid and very lonely), I would be dead, figuratively and maybe even really. Connecting personally at a human level was a necessity and that’s what I think the best fieldwork is.

Oh and I always wanted to be a truck driver, to be up there steering that massive machine, oiling the wheels of commerce, on the road, runnin’ down a dream. But I never got out of school.

>>>>>

Instead of dealing with why the poster was problematic (e.g. 
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/continued-dehumanization-blacks

http://www.theroot.com/views/lighter-skin-shorter-prison-term), and confronting the racism/racial blindness that made the poster’s creation and being put up–uncritically–*in an anthropology department* possible, the department quickly took it down and covered up the outrage over the incident/pretended it never happened. This desire to cover up (another) embarrassing example of antiblack racism and racist insensitivity in the department–instead of making it a ‘teachable moment’ to ensure the practice of a genuinely antiracist anthropology which does not encourage ‘white public space’, directly illustrates the problematic legacy of an anthropology that has historically ‘spoken for’ non-whites and in many ways continues to encourage this ‘speaking for’ (and not listening to). The inability of most of the department’s white professors not to notice how offensive this racist gorilla poster was, prior to a black anthropologist pointing it out, is why I keep stressing that anthropology needs to discuss white privilege–and not angrily dismiss and avoid such discussions. White anthropologists should take seriously the extent to which their privilege can blind them to what should be obvious racism to be publicly repudiated, in the name of AAA’s official antiracism statements.

I am old (I will turn 68 this year). My academic career consists of a first job, failure to get tenure (not surprising given how clueless, self-centered, and tactless I was), and several years teaching seminars on advertising and marketing in Japan as an adjunct lecturer at a Japanese university (I have lived in Japan for 32 years). Since I am an independent scholar, who is not dependent on academia for his livelihood, I enjoy the luxury of treating anthropology as a serious hobby. As a hobbyist free of career-related concerns, I am in a position to speak my mind bluntly, and I do. One the the things I detest most is people who draw conclusions about other people based on gross stereotypes. That animus applies to all of those who push ethnically or racially defined agendas—regardless of whether their politics are left, right or over the moon. I can still hear a case worth making when I read someone like Kimberle Crenshawe or hear someone here, I forget who it was, observe that minority anthropologists are the ones who get stuck with addressing diversity issues and dealing with minority students—an extra burden they absolutely don’t need. Were I in a position to do something about that sort of problem, I would.

Be that as it may be. We have, I believe, reached an impasse. I leave this debate with a couple of paragraphs from the acknowledgements to my book on Japanese consumer behavior. My life and times were such that they three men I acknowledge in this remarks were all men, none of them black. But the attitudes they embodied so well are those I try to emulate, not always very successfully.

This book is dedicated to the memories of three men: Victor Turner, Tio Se-lian, and Kimoto Kazuhiko.

The third was a Senior Creative Director who hired a hapless scholar and turned him, with much labour, into a copywriter unable to tolerate stereotypes of the kind this book attacks.
Looking back what I see in all three is a willingness to listen, a passion for detail, a flair for the dramatic, and a breadth of humanity that transcends the places and moments in which we met. I am proud to call them my mentors and to try, however poorly, to follow their example.

Saying that you, as a white man, should not be ‘speaking for’ and as the ‘expert’ for racial subjects whose subject position and racialized experience you not only do not share but also do not actually understand–and are not actually making an effort to educate yourself about, by actually listening to (and not dismissing) the experiences of racism/sexism you are blind to because they are not your daily reality–is not the same as saying that your life has nothing to do with ours.

I think we need to be honest about how much of the racist disrespect–as also identified by recent comments from Vincent M. Diaz is a structural and methodological result of the practice of anthropology. Many white anthropologists are attracted to anthropology because it allows them to speak for non-white others after ‘going native’. Critical race theory and white privilege acknowledgement of the kind discussed on unfaircampaign.org is completely antithetical to this kind of anthropological project–which continues to remain foundational to the practice of anthropology. I am being showered with abuse because my comments make certain people angry for rejecting the proposition that they can be the experts of non-white experiences of the world: and no, this is not the same as saying that one can’t educate oneself about one’s own privilege or how non-white subjects experience their racial positionalities. But stop trying to dominate conversations by claiming expertise you don’t in fact have and can NEVER get via firsthand experience (i.e. ‘going native’). Stop speaking from a position of privilege while denying this is what it is. Stop expecting more respect than you are willing to give others, and demanding it because one has been socialized–since birth–to feel entitled to greater respect and deference because one is male and/or white. Listen to what people like me and EBW actually have to say without presuming to know better and to know more.

Anthropology is officially supposed to be committed to antiracism, so be committed to *antiracism*: not race avoidance and white privilege denial and being verbally abuse so you can feel you have put ‘subordinates’ who have not agreed with you ‘in their place’. Because none of this is antiracist, and in the end it does not make for good anthropological scholarship (why encourage having serious blindspots antithetical to analytical rigor, as pointed about by Race and Gender Cannot Be Supplements?), and instead normalize and encourage abuse and make anthropology the ‘white public space’ discussed in the Brodkin et al. article.

“it was no big deal for people in power to respond to morally justified “

What makes you think that I claim to know what is best for Discuss White Privilege? I certainly don’t. In my view, what is best for her is something that she has to decide for herself. All I can do is offer feedback on what I hear, which, I have noted repeatedly may not be what she wants to say.

What makes either of you think that a white man cannot draw on his own experience to gain some insight into the problems that black women face? Pushed to its logical extreme, this argument renders the anthropological project, attempting to understand other lives in other places absurd. At the same time, it has a huge political downside. Persuade me that my life has nothing to do with yours, and why should I or anyone else who isn’t a black woman care about what you say?

Oddly enough, I have recently read Kimberlé Crenshawe’s Stanford Law Review Article — I say “oddly enough” because the article was suggested to me by a Norwegian feminist I encountered on OAC. Thus, while I still regard “intersectionality” as an abominable term, I can see that it points to a real problem. If, one the one hand, you have a feminist movement that ignores a black woman’s being black and a black civil rights movement that is focused on the problems of black men and ignores the black woman’s being a woman, the issues specific to being both black and a woman fall through the cracks. I get that. But how should that problem be addressed?

I offer a cynical but real hypothesis for your consideration. When the US and global economy were booming and lots of new academic and other jobs were being created, it was no big deal for people in power to morally justified claims of being oppressed or neglected by allocating surplus to co-opt critics and open the doors a bit to those willing to play their games. With the US and global economy in recession, jobs scarce, and lots of people struggling to get by, let alone get ahead, there is both less surplus to allocate and less tolerance for even morally justified claims presented in what is heard in —however wrong the listener is — a strident, judgmental tone. I am not saying that tone is unjustified. I am saying that as a rhetorical tactic, it never worked all that well, and today may be totally unproductive.

What alternatives are there? That’s not an easy question to answer. Shutting up and submitting to fate is neither a desirable nor a viable option. Me? I am old and sentimental enough to think that when Martin Luther King said, “We shall overcome,” his “We” was bigger than any racial, gender or ethnic category. Yes, he wound up dead. Revolutions make martyrs and vice-versa. But the movement he started is still of historic significance. Might be worth thinking about.