I am not struggling to get an academic job. In fact, I am sufficiently disgusted by the hypocrisy and institutional racism/sexism in anthropology to see the prospect of teaching anthropology as a sure path to an early grave.

A wise decision, I agree. So, if I may ask, how do you make a living? (As I have mentioned before, I got an academic job, failed to get tenure, followed my wife to Japan, and stumbled into a career in the Japanese advertising world. My sagacious spouse and I are now owner-partners in The Word Works, Ltd. ).

I think one of the key points you are missing in answering my question as you have, which is itself a sign and effect of white privilege/power, is that I am most certainly *not* making a ‘woe is me, I have it worst, everyone needs to care about my problems as their number-one priority’ argument.

I take you at your word. Just have to say, though, that is the way you came across to me. While unconscious prejudice may have something to do with that, I don’t, speaking as a communication professional, think that is the only reason.

all the problems you listed as more pressing than my complaints, actually are also issues of racial inequality–from the racial/racist underpinnings of opposition to ‘ Obamacare’ (as Mitt Romney more than made clear this week in his sour grapes grumbling about Obama giving away ‘gifts’ to minorities so as to get votes, to the imbrication of race and class such that one should be cognizant of the racial demographics of the Hostess factory workers, to how racist US foreign policy (both historic and contemporary), which does not prioritize all lives equally, or as much as white lives, especially in previous generations) has contributed both to the social suffering in Afghanistan and the issue of global poverty.

Of course. But that “of course” may, I believe, be at least a partial explanation for the reception your remarks have received on SM. Isn’t this sort of thing Anthro 101 these days?

To say that is not to discount or dismiss what you have to say. It is to say that, while perfectly valid, it is also old hat, something that people here are likely to have heard many times before.

You describe the AAA as hypocritical when it comes to race. I do not think you are wrong. Perhaps I have been in Japan too long or been too influenced by my engagements with Democratic Party politics. Whatever the cause, I regard hypocrisy as a social lubricant. Too much is a mess. Too little brings things grinding to a halt or, worse, destroys the social machinery in question. I believe that the colleagues who made race the theme of the AAA meetings were not being disingenuous. They were and are, however, faced with a fundamental contradiction. They do not wish to brush the issue under the carpet. They are also aware that they themselves occupy privileged positions for which, at least in recent years, they have had to work incredibly hard and take full advantage of every edge that came their way. They are naturally reluctant to give them up or change the system in whose terms they themselves have succeeded. Thus they have taken what is, at best, a partial step toward addressing racism in as well as outside of anthropology itself.

Speaking now in terms of tactics (I did say that I would be annoying), I ask myself what is the best approach for building on what they have done and winning their support for further steps in the right direction? Is condemnation for failing to achieve the goals their rhetoric suggest the right approach? Or is it saying, “That was a great thing you did, making racism the theme of the association’s official meeting. What should be our next step? What can we do together?” Again, maybe I have been in Japan too long, but what works here in all sorts of situation’s confirms my southern steel magnolia grandmother’s folklore: “You catch more flies with honey than with lemon juice.”

I think one of the key points you are missing in answering my question as you have, which is itself a sign and effect of white privilege/power, is that I am most certainly *not* making a ‘woe is me, I have it worst, everyone needs to care about my problems as their number-one priority’ argument. Not even close. (And this kind of response is a common derailing response, though I know you did not consciously intend it as such. But this is why anthropologists need to talk about white privilege and how whites are socialized as whites such that this is so often their response when asked to engage the concept of white privilege/power/supremacy.)

In fact, I am making two fundamentally anthropological claims/observations: first, that if anthropology is going to have an *official* antiracism position, then practitioners should practice the antiracism they preach, especially to others–which, unfortunately, is not the present state of affairs; and second, I am pointing out how the racism and white privilege many anthropologists don’t want to engage and acknowledge is not only negatively affecting the analytical arguments they are making and the scholarship they are producing due to the kind of massive, should-be-obvious theoretical blind spots I pointed out in my first post as Discuss White Privilege (in relation to hippies and hackers), but am pointing out that this constant race evacuation actually is helping to (re)produce the racism anthropology, and the AAA in particular, OFFICIALLY claims to repudiate.

To the extent that I constantly reference myself and my own experiences the self-referentiality is a form of anthropological humility, not solipsism, both via taking all those post-Writing Culture admonitions about self-reflexivity and situating one’s self and one’s biases and limited perspective seriously, and an acknowledgment that I can often see what you can’t not because I am smarter and more virtuous than you, but because I can’t take the same privileges I am critiquing for granted in the same ways you can. Anthropologists love to talk about and advocate situated knowledge, and yet all too often the scholarship being produced, especially at the most status-conferring levels of ‘philosophical anthropology’, is actually *white* scholarship (i.e. written from the perspective of a white racial subject and its corresponding embodied experience of the world absent subaltern racial status) which does not acknowledge its racial subjectivity but then gets used to club non-white anthropologists over the head for having a different non-race-evacuated perspective, such that the former is labeled ‘real’/’smart’ anthropology and the latter is seen as unsmart, second-rate scholarship, “meaningless” and “personal” “whining”.

The issue is not about me (whining about) my problems, the issue is about how racism is affecting the kind of anthropological scholarship produced (including via driving some people out of the discipline such that their contributions are lost) and why such de facto racist scholarship, intended or not, is a problem–especially in a discipline which officially claims to be antiracist.

What then of morality and politics write large? Are your problems more pressing than those of the workers at Papa John’s pizza whose hours are being limited because their a-hole boss doesn’t want to pay for Obama cafe, or the 1700 bakery workers who have just lost their jobs making Twinkies because Hostess is shutting down? What about the kids dying in Gaza and Syria? The girls in Afghanistan who run the risk of being killed for the crime of going to school? The millions who don’t get enough to eat, having had the misfortune to be born in places where the average wage is under a dollar a day?

Institutional racism is real, it’s ugly, it’s hypocritical. If you want to talk about what to do about that, I’m on board. I’m not sure that I have a whole lot to say that hasn’t been said before, and I will annoy the hell out of you by talking possibilities, strategy and tactics instead of being shocked and horrified by stuff that’s been all too familiar for the nearly seventy years I’ve been alive. (I was there when the Panthers took over the student union at Cornell and made the front page of Time in 1968, when the Kennedy’s and King were assassinated. From my perspective the internal politics of the AAA are a tempest in a teapot.)

I saw T’s question on georaciality a few days ago but felt too drained by the previous discussion to respond, thinking how troubling it is that the 2012 AAA conference keynote panel was on race and yet there continues to be so much denial of and indifference to what should be *obvious* persistent forms of racial inequality and global race/color hierarchies. Similarly, and as also relates to the present AAA meetings and ‘do as I say, not as I do’ racism of (academic) anthropology, even when people know that a certain anthropologist (now at AAAs) has engaged in blatant and shocking acts of antiblack racism which encourage people to feel justified in making judgments based on the race/gender/color biases discussed in the Techyville article, most (white) anthropologists can’t be bothered to care or repudiate the racism/racist sexism (and one can’t discuss the situation without it being censored on this blog, so as to show unethical, racist, and patriarchal deference to the celebrity anthropologists implicated in the cover-up of this widely known and publicly documented case of ongoing racist bullying).

It just all leaves me wondering what the point is of any of these Savage Minds, anthropology discussions is when it doesn’t change racist behavior or override racial biases, at either the micro/macro or individual/collective levels. It is tiring to be constantly trying to get *anthropologists* to be aware of racial disparities and implicit biases which should be obvious *to anthropologists*, especially from the US or working in the US. And I don’t write this rudely or as an ‘aggressive’ ‘Angry Black Woman’ slap-down (though based on past history I know my comments will of course be taken as such). Just being honest, and thinking of the concept of *sanctioned ignorance*.

Especially as I started posting on this site as Discuss White Privilege in response to Adam Fish’s discussion of Dorien Zandenbergen’s work in/on Silicon Valley and to query how it was not obvious that being a white anthropogist affected the experience of fieldwork and the ethnography it produced, I have to wonder why I constantly have to point out the obvious–over and over and over again–about how race (and color) affect how one experiences the world–especially as an anthropologist–in the US and abroad (i.e. globally): it affects the access you will have–especially to elites, and elite white men in particular; it affects the responses you will get, from other anthropologists included–including the kind of vicious, unethical personal attacks and character assassination you will be subjected to, especially for the ‘crime’ of frankly discussing how you are analyzing whiteness–anthropologically–in your scholarship; it affects the kind of funding and support you will or will not get, as well as your employment prospects (despite the comments of some white anthropology professors and their white male graduate students from a certain department who or on the record as saying “non-whites get jobs and fellowships thrown at them” such that black female graduate students doing projects on whiteness and race/gender inequalities need to “keep your ‘privilege’ critique at home if you want to be friends”), based on people’s racist-colorist ideas about how intelligent and ‘non-threatening’ you are.

Some of the responses to my comments on this site have reminded me of the Chris Rock skit in which he states that white people love to talk about how good he has it because he is rich, while downplaying the persistence of racism, yet not one of these people would take a million dollars to trade places with him and live life as a black man. So when I read the georaciality question (and this is no attack on T), it made me tired, because I thought to myself: Why must we always pretend that we don’t ALL already know, implicitly, what georaciality is, or take issue with the concept of a global racial (race/color) hierarchy? As if the people who generally fight me on this concept (who are usually white or white-identified, and often white males) would ever switch places with me and give up their white male privilege so as to live in the world as a dark-skinned black woman: especially as such a subject position would clearly affect their access and mobility as an anthropologist–as well as a politician trying to become president, as a person trying to get a job, or as a person working in the advertising industry in Japan ( especially two or three decades ago)? Why must we keep having these persistent denials about the persistence/ persistent salience of racial inequality, especially from the people most benefitting from its persistence, as if (these) people really believe that things are so equal and unbiased? If nothing else, it is massively *intellectually* dishonest. We all know the proverbial playing field is far from equal, here and elsewhere, as statistical research confirms over and over and over again. So, as anthropologists in a discipline which officially claims to be antiracist, why are we debating basic (Durkheimian) *social facts*, while doing so very little to directly confront the implicit bias and structural racism which makes them possible (including by sanctioning ignorance about what should be obvious)?

I can say more later if necessary.

What is georaciality?

As I said: white supremacy. And not mild offense.

I agree that other forms of prejudice are salient and operational. But it is hard to disentangle them from racism, much of the time, and these other forms of prejudice are often co-constructed and imbricated with racial forms of prejudice.

My comments to John focused on the US since the racist hate tweets were about the US election and the geographic distribution of those tweets in the US. I definitely agree that we should be careful about reifying the black/white racial binary, in the US or abroad, or representing it as the only form of racism. This said, the black/white racial binary still structures racial hierarchies in the US and structures ‘georaciality’. There is still a global orientation toward whiteness, even as people may challenge white hegemony and have local forms of racism which do not map exactly onto US racial categories and US racism. But even when we move outside the US we are dealing with an orientation toward whiteness and a pigments racy from white/light to black/white (especially around status symbols and aesthetic ideals). And abroad as in the US blacks, especially the darker they are, are all too often understood in regressive racist terms as the least ‘developed’, least intelligent, and, alas, least human. So given Anthropology’s complicity in making all this possible relative to its implication in colonialism and ‘biological racism’, and given AAA’s official race statements, we have a disciplinary responsibility to be honest about these ugly racial–and racist–hierarchies and categories and why they exist and persist.

Again, Ryan, thanks for the feedback.

“I observed that the authors claim to have collected all geocoded tweets from the week of November 1, but they also say that what they analyzed was the distribution of 395 hate tweets. Given that the population of the USA is now a bit over 314 million people, that raises questions about how representative this sample is…”

From what I understand, this data is not a sample. From the FAQ link above:

“The 395 tweets mentioned are the number of geocoded tweets referencing the given keywords from November 1 until November 7 at approximately 4:00 pm EST. This is NOT a sample, but the total population of geocoded tweets that matched our search criteria as outlined in the post.”

John again:

“Yes, racism is still a serious problem in the USA, but the equations white=racist, even red state Romney voter=racist are clearly wrong. We left-leaning liberals also have to be careful about our own prejudices and how they affect the way we read data.”

Good points, John, especially about making assumptions based upon prejudices. The problem with that, of course, is that’s it’s another instance of making sweeping generalizations, which is part of the overall problem here.

DWP wrote: “The veracity of the social calculus white= racist depends on how one understands and defines racism. If it is as overt and explicit enunciation a of hatred, as with the post-election Twitter posts discussed above, then yes, many people will be exempted. But if the definition is more nuanced and focuses on structural racism, institutional racism, unconscious/dysconscious racism, aversive racism, colorism, and racial bias, then the discussion of who/what is and is not racist changes dramatically.”

I think the definition part of racism is an important issue. We need to try to be as clear as possible about what, exactly, we are talking about. And I think you make good point about the fact that racism and prejudice can take many forms, many of which can be subtle (yet no less powerful and damaging). But I also think John has a point about not letting the term get stretched so far that it starts to lose meaning.

And, while racism in the US is often thought of primarily in black/white terms, I think it’s important to keep in mind that racism around the world (and even in the US) takes various forms. Another issue that confuses some of the conversations about racism is that other prejudicial factors are sometimes conflated with race (religion, class, culture, etc). So I do think that trying to keep definitions as clear as possible is important, although easier said than done.

Thanks for the comments folks.

And yet for many, especially the racist Twitter commenters discussed in this post, even the half-white and Ivy League-educated Barack Obama is ‘too black’. So, not surprising that Glenda Moore was not helped by her neighbors. (Or I should say, not surprising to me as I have repeatedly been on the receiving end of the same antiblack racism cum colorism, and the ‘bad Samaritanism’ it produces and normalizes. Given that the AAA meetings commence in 24 hours: anthropologists could use the Moore family tragedy as a ‘teachable moment’ for addressing racism within and outside academic anthropology, to push for substantive antiracist policies, within anthropology departments and from the Obama administration, and such that white anthropologists, as a group, do not keep minimizing the forms and extent of contemporary racism within and outside the academy, but will this actually happen? Doubtful.) Gets at what Harry Reid said about electability, and how *most* (white) people understand blackness, especially the darker skinned the person ascribed black racial status.

Why can’t we just be honest about this? The statistics on racial disparities and colorism certainly are. And those certainly are not about 300-plus tweets. The ‘left-leaning liberals’ in the Hollywood entertainment industry, fashion and advertising industries, news media still share the same racist-colorist biases which kept people from opening the door for Glenda Moore and which make this kind of criminal ‘justice’ possible (http://www.theroot.com/views/lighter-skin-shorter-prison-term), even if none of these left-leaning liberals voted for Mitt Romney or posted a racist post-election tweet.

White supremacy. Definitely not about ‘mild offense’, to say the least.