Almost five months into the epidemic, on August 8, 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a “public health emergency of international concern.” Military and police responses — both international and national — played a crucial role in responses to the epidemic. A few weeks later, on August 20th, the Liberian military quarantined residents of West Point in the capital city of Monrovia without advance warning, essentially cutting them off from food and supplies and causing thousands of residents to clash with troops and riot police. Images surfaced of troops firing live rounds and tear gas and viciously beating back residents who challenged the lockdown. Military-enforced quarantines around entire districts of Sierra Leone and the shift of power from the ministry of health to the ministry of defense were key features of its Ebola response.

Across the Atlantic, on August 9, 2014, 18-year old unarmed Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Peaceful protests and civil disorder ensued in the following weeks, prompting the governor to declare a “state of emergency” and call on local police and the National Guard to control protests and maintain curfews. Greater public attention was placed on the increasing militarization of local police forces as the grand jury, which was convened to hear evidence of the circumstances surrounding the death of Michael Brown, reached a decision not to indict Officer Wilson.

Despite public discourse about the increasing militarization of the police and the political frame of ‘crisis,’ the most notable recent incidents of police brutality in Ferguson, Staten Island, Saratoga Springs, Los Angeles and the subsequent deaths of Black Americans like Tanisha Anderson, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Aiyanna Jones, Roshad McIntosh, Dante Parker, and Kajieme Powell, are rather ordinary and predictable events in America. These incidents and precious lives lost represent the enduring legacy of American white supremacy and pervasive racism that structures the US criminal justice system and our broader society.

For the region most affected by the West African Ebola outbreak, fragmented and slowly rebuilding health systems, coupled with a delayed response by international agencies have precipitated a serious public health crisis and humanitarian emergency. But, as in the US case, this crisis must also be understood in historical context — and in particular, in relation to empire-building and racial projects. Legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, European (and US) colonialism, post-colonial aid dependency, and civil wars have contributed not only to patterns of the disease’s spread, but also to earlier failures of government and international actors to mount a coordinated response.

This year seemed especially difficult for those of us trying to make sense of these events from afar and for those of us who have deep and intimate connections to these places. During the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in early December 2014, therefore, the theme “Producing Anthropology” took on a distinctly activist and political charge. Anthropologists organized protests, drafted resolutions, and put together ‘breaking’ panels to discuss the most pressing issues facing us in the moment: the West African Ebola outbreak; Ferguson and police violence in black communities in the US; divestment from Israel and other progressive social movements with which anthropologists currently align themselves.

There was, however, a stark contrast in the support extended to these issues by the association-at-large, subsections and interest groups, and individual members. And this contrast is at the root of our sense that mainstream anthropology — and its practitioners — reproduces injustices it claims to expose and, at best, the ones it seeks to correct. This contrast is at the root of the discipline’s failure to recognize divisions between minority and non-minority anthropologists as a crisis within its ranks and to misrecognize enduring systemic failures as discrete time-framed crises for the sake of justifying anthropology’s relevance.

Two weeks before the annual meetings, just a couple of miles away, the AAA co-sponsored a two-day emergency meeting at the George Washington University, in which it convened more than 25 social scientists — specialists of the region and/or in infectious diseases — to provide concrete recommendations to aid international responders to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. While the impact of this intervention remains to be seen, the financial and logistical support from AAA and Wenner-Gren was notable; the executive director presented this meeting as a way for the association to appear “relevant.” Anthropologists were asked to “take critique off the table” as a condition of their participation; for it was to be the primary means by which anthropologists could effectively engage with policymakers and front-line responders.

Whereas initiatives related to Ebola were generously supported (and funded) by our main anthropological institutions, “minority” interest groups like the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) were told that they were expected to pursue an agenda on Ferguson, racism, and violence on their own and with little support from executive leadership. The ABA’s statement brilliantly and explicitly calls out this marginalization and what it represents — global and national anti-black racism and anthropology’s complicity with racializing and colonizing projects, including the production of particular black and brown subjects. (AAA president Monica Heller later released a statement on police violence on December 19).

AAA leadership’s disparate focus on these two issues of concern raises questions about where anthropology locates its “objects” of inquiry, its impetus for protest, and its ideological commitments to social justice and critical analysis of power. It had the two of us — medical anthropologists who engage in global health research in the US and West Africa — wondering which black lives matter for the ‘production of anthropology’ and how such deliberations are a function of anthropology’s fraught history with colonial projects; and its alignment with institutions that sometimes indirectly, sometimes quite perniciously, devalue black and brown lives in the discipline and our society at large.

Taken together, the two official responses by executive leadership mirror the two types of misrecognition that facilitate and embolden endemic racism within the discipline. The ordinariness of these events — the possibility that we are not witnessing discrete events but, rather, spectacular instantiations of enduring injustice — forms the basis of two types of misrecognition. One is forced misrecognition, in which anthropologists are asked to put aside their critical faculties to assist in an epidemic crisis, willfully ignoring or tabling questions of health systems, international political economy, and local governance, while also, paradoxically, engaging with them as something anthropologists (alone) know best and can change. The other form of misrecognition is unconscious, ideological: one in which an African crisis is a ‘natural’ node for anthropological intervention and insights, but a North American normal requires no global comment, no provision of financial resources, no gathering of “great minds.” Both kinds of misrecognition are functions of how anthropology positions itself vis-à-vis “the other” but fails to acknowledge and is complicit with anti-black racism in its ranks and in its professional practice.

This time next year, we will again gather at the 2015 AAA annual meeting in Denver, giving and attending talks centered on the theme of “Familiar/Strange.” Perhaps this thematic focus will prompt wholescale reflection, discussion, and plans for action around questions of our collective misrecognition and the racial politics of crises. Meanwhile, global anti-black racism lives on as an ordinary defining fact of life for many of us.

There are many sources to learn about this stream of thought. Leith Mullings 2013 AAA Presidential address is a good starting place. Over a year ago I asked the AAA if we could transcribe it and throw it up on SM but they said no because they wanted to publish it, which has not happened yet (or perhaps I missed it). So for now even the text-inclined will have to go to YouTube (hey, at least it’s open access). Another source is Harrison’s own African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (the shortcut version of this book is the ABA’s ‘pioneers’ page).

In truth one might wonder why we could call this an ‘alternate canon’? After all, how can a presidential address be ‘alternate’? The answer has a lot do with who and where has the money to train the next generation of graduate students. But rather than try to go over this whole history, which I know so little about, I thought I would try to focus on a single figure: St. Clair Drake.

The wikipedia entry on Drake is gives a good overview of his work: His work on two key pieces of anthropology, Black Metropolis and Deep South (both collaborative projects), his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and his time as a professor at Roosevelt (in Chicago) and then Stanford. For many people, he is a foundational figure in black/afro-descended anthropology.

If you’d like to learn more, perhaps the best place to go is his trio of autobiographical articles “Anthropology and the Black Experience“, “Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience” (maybe the most accessible of the three?) and “Further Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience“. This last piece is part of one of the early issues of Transforming Anthropology (the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists, which is part of the AAA) which has a special section of Drake — all of the articles in it are worth reading.

The French, for various reasons, latched on the urban anthropology and sociology early on, but could not take it’s cultural context for granted. As a result there is a lot of good intellectual history of this topic in French (work on Goffman, Robert Park and the Chicago school, etc). This includes an excellent and accessible article on the amazing “Making Of Black Metropolis“. The Chicago Reader (the local listings mag) also has a contemporary review of Black Metropolis.

Jerry Gershenhorn, who made his name doing work on Melville Herskovits, has recently started working on African-American scholars, including St. Clair Drake. Check out Gershenhorn’s faculty page for publications. To be frank, Drake is far more compelling, personally, than Melville Herskovits.

There is also a variety of Drake’s work available open access on the web —  though, IANAL, I have no idea how it got there. This biggest one is, of course, stclairdrake.net. That site’s webibliography has a great selection of key texts about and by Drake, and many of them are available for download and very juicy, such as The American Dream and The Negro: One Hundred Years of Freedom? But there are other sources as well. If you really want to wonk out, archive.org has a copy of Drake’s 300+ page report Churches and Voluntary Associations in the Chicago Negro Community from 1940.

It would be wrong to think of Drake as just an anthropologist — he was a sociologist and founder of African-American studies as well. and it would be wrong to think of his work as somehow only of interest to people interested in black people. As his loose disciplinary affiliation suggests, Drake was hardly parochial. In fact, he was part of something much larger: The activist, bohemian and intellectual realm which was the context of anthropology’s crystallization. Anyone interested in the history of our discipline — or in challenging our disciplinarity! — needs to reckon with St. Clair Drake as an important figure.

But I really don’t think I’m an expert in this field, so I’d love to see any additional links or resources pop up in the comments.

Like hundreds of others, I participated in the December 5th die in at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, D.C. Under the leadership of the Association of Black Anthropologists and galvanized through the ABA’s alliance-building with other kindred-thinking AAA sections, the main lobby of the Marriott Hotel was converted into a symbolic space of social death for four and a half minutes. Darren Wilson and his fellow Ferguson, Missouri police officers left the lifeless body of teenager Michael Brown in the middle of the street for four and half hours before it was covered up and taken away. Four and a half hours of exposure to the elements; four and a half hours of utter disrespect for the loss of the young man’s life and disrespect for the family and community that would grieve the killing of yet another son on blood-stained ground. A blood-stained landscape of social and real-life death links Fruitvale Station in Oakland, California to Ferguson, Missouri and countless other sites across the nation and the world, where the lives of blacks and other people of color are being targeted for harassment, arrest, incarceration, and, in the worst case scenario, elimination and disposal.

In the racialized spaces of social death wherein Black lives are rendered less than fully human, Black male and female encounters with police and also with the vigilante violence of citizens enacting a stand-your-ground logic have disproportionately resulted in the wrongful deaths of unarmed adolescents and adults, sons and fathers like Staten Island, New York’s Eric Garner. It’s imperative that we understand that daughters, mothers, and grandmothers are not immune to this kind of existential vulnerability. The Black females who have died from wrongful police killings—including 93 year-old Pearlie Smith and 7-year old Aiyana Jones—have been much less visible in the media and in mass protest action. This phenomenon results from a racialized gender bias that needs to be better understood so that it can be effectively redressed.

A tragic pattern prevails across the land; it represents an escalation of extrajudicial executions targeting black and other dark(ened) bodies, whose culpability is conjured through criminalizing accusations. They are guilty of driving, walking, talking back, and, in the case of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida, even of listening to loud music while Black. The widely shared presumption is that these targeted individuals were dangerous threats to law and order and to personal security, particularly white people’s safety and undisturbed peace. The controlling image or stereotype of the violently aggressive thug has been indiscriminately projected upon black bodies, particularly those performing black masculinities. The refusal of grand juries to indict and, in the case of trials, of juries to convict the rightful perpetrators of this violence reflects the extent to which black lives are devalued and infra-humanized in this society. It is for this reason that protesters all across the country and even our allies in other national settings are carrying signs asserting that “Black Lives Matter!” and exhorting “Don’t Shoot!”

These poignant declarations resonate with those being made in public protests against the undeclared war on black youth in Brazil, where the pacification of poor neighborhoods, to make way for the World Cup and Olympics, is intensifying the already existent racially-marked violence of police and privately-commissioned militias—death squads—that participate in the ethnic/social cleansing of urban and rural space. The coercive dislocation and elimination of black people is an integral feature of the systematic land grab that Keisha-Khan Perry brilliantly analyzes in her award-winning ethnography, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (2013). Other anthropologists working in Brazil are also documenting these trends, such as Christen Smith and João Costa Vargas. Vargas analyzes them in terms of an anti-black genocidal continuum which also exists in other African diasporic settings, including the United States.

Human rights reports have also documented the extent to which racial profiling, extrajudicial executions, and police impunity are troubling trends in both Brazil and the United States of America. In 2009 two relevant documents were issued: Human Rights Watch’s Lethal Force: Police Violence and Public Security in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Related Intolerance’s follow-up report on the implementation, or lack thereof, of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action. I am referring specifically to the addendum on the internationally renowned lawyer and legal scholar Doudou Diène’s 2008 mission to the United States. A major portion of his report dealt with law enforcement, which rivaled with immigration control and counterterrorism as a context for racialized human rights abuse.

Our declarations of “Black Lives Matter” also resonate with the human rights protests all across Mexico, where 43 students, many if not all from poor indigenous backgrounds, disappeared from a teachers college in Iguala, Guerrero in September. They were abducted by police and handed over to a drug gang that murdered them, if rumors and initial forensic evidence are accurate. That the lives of those 43 students matter has been collectively expressed in demonstrations and declarations demanding that the federal government hold the instigators and perpetrators of the crime against humanity accountable and return the students to their families and communities—that is, if they are still alive. However, if the students have perished, the government has the responsibility to conduct a comprehensive investigation and provide a public explanation of what happened and why. And it has the responsibility to punish the culprits, going against the grain of a political culture of impunity and corruption.

On November 25, 2014, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), of which I am currently president, published a brief statement in solidarity with Mexican and Latin American protesters, who include anthropologists, on the opinion page of the newspaper La Jornada. Like Ferguson, Mo., this is a tragic case of youth from oppressed communities being targeted by repressive social control practices, from militarized policing and para-militarized repression to a whole range of neoliberalized modes of governance. As an anthropologist, a concerned citizen, and a mother, my mapping of human rights violations zooms in on my own backyard as well as in more distant zones of power disparities.

The four and a half minutes we all lay in complete silence on the lobby floor were quite intense. I filled my mind with meditative thoughts of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and their parents, who channeled their profound grief and sorrow into internationally visible activism. I also saw the faces of my own three sons, now men. I remembered when I delivered the eldest during an unexpectedly difficult and protracted labor. Anxieties mounted within me about the challenges I would face of raising a Black male child in a racist society in which a threatening otherness would be attributed to him. I suspected that much of the discrimination he was likely to face would be much more subtle than what his father and grandfathers had known. But what I feared most and couldn’t get out of mind was the specter of brutal police force and the potential hate crimes to which he might be subjected. I wondered whether, as a parent and a member of a wider family and community, I would be sufficiently able to protect him and to guide him into full adulthood. I meditated and prayed that I would be able to meet the challenges and demands of Black motherhood.

As I labored with all my might to give birth to my baby boy, my man child who would be born into an unfulfilled promise land, I questioned whether the neoliberal logic likely to be applied during the 1980s Reaganomics regime would lead to a milieu marked by even more dangerous racializing meanings, conditions, and practices, contrary to the expectations born of civil rights era optimism. Years later I would come to know that so much of the research anthropologists have done on the neoliberal landscapes of the past three decades have illuminated the troubling effects of structural racism’s persistence and remaking in its entanglements with other dimensions of social inequality and conflict—class, gender, sexuality, and generation or age. However, the current conjuncture, articulated now as the Age of Ferguson, has severely challenged the optimism that many antiracist liberals and leftists have long embodied about the extent to which our society has changed for the better and is capable of changing at a positively discernible pace.

The depth, intensity, and pervasiveness of anti-blackness in the fabric of U.S. society compel us to rethink our models of and for social transformation. Those who subscribe to more pessimistic perspectives, such as scholars and activists associated with the Derrick Bell-variety of critical race theory and the intellectual trajectory known as Afro-pessimism, urge us to relinquish our political naïveté in favor of a more critically realistic views of what is, what is possible, and what should be done about them. Whether optimist, pessimist, or somewhere in between, perhaps we can agree that the “Black Lives Matter,” “Don’t Shoot” and “I Can’t Breathe” demonstrations proliferating across the country clearly belie the widespread postracial pretensions and conceit that have denied grievances against racism the legitimacy as well as the political and policy attention they rightfully deserve.

The four and a half minutes were over. After getting up from the floor, I interacted with the two women who were nearest to me. One remarked on how intense those few minutes of silence had been for her. I agreed, as I wiped away tears streaming from my eyes. After exchanging our feelings and reactions, we gave each other a big group hug and expressed sincere thanks and appreciation for having experienced the die in with colleagues whose knowledge, sensibilities and politics we respected. That night at the AAA Business meeting, after a prolonged debate on a contentious resolution not to support the boycott against Israeli academic institutions, which was voted down, a motion from the Section Assembly was passed without any opposition. The motion called for the association’s making a public statement on Ferguson and Staten Island, appointing a task force to determine what anthropologists can do to address racialized policing, and urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate extrajudicial violence and killing. Many of us left the AAA meeting feeling that anthropologists can and will find meaningful ways to play a part in the struggle, as it will continue to unfold in the years to come. La lucha continúa. A luta continua. The struggle continues.

Die-In, lobby of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington DC

ABA Statement Against Police Violence and Anti-Black Practices (8 December 2014)

The Association of Black Anthropologists condemns, in no uncertain terms, the ongoing terrorism waged against Black U.S. communities by the state, police, and White vigilantes. We condemn the executions of our boys and girls, women and men by the police in Ferguson, Staten Island, Saratoga Springs, Los Angeles, and throughout the country. We also recognize that these forms of state violence are perpetrated against Black people globally. We are enraged by the fact that no police officer has been indicted in the recent murders of Aiyanna Jones, Michael Brown and Eric Garner; and we are outraged that in the hundred days since the murder of Michael Brown, police have also murdered unarmed Ezell Ford, unarmed Tanisha Anderson, unarmed Roshad McIntosh, unarmed Akai Gurley, unarmed Dante Parker and unarmed Kajieme Powell. These are state-sponsored massacres of our people, massacres enabled by a long history of national and global anti-Blackness.

As it pertains to the ongoing atrocities of the criminal justice system in this country – alongside those who spoke before the United Nations in November, we charge genocide.[1]

As members of the academic discipline with the distinctive history of establishing the language and “science” of race to justify settler colonialism and slavery, we recognize full well that the root of today’s anti-Black state-sponsored violence in the U.S. is white supremacy. We know that our discipline played a significant role in developing the trope of a particular Black subject – the “urban” Black – that has been deployed by society at large to dehumanize Black people.  At the same time, we also realize that our discipline has been tepid in fruitfully acknowledging and addressing its own white supremacist foundation. We therefore call on our colleagues in the American Anthropological Association to join us in not only condemning this history but also in affirming that Black Lives Matter – beyond the role of ethnographic subjects and cultural vessels. We call on our colleagues in anthropology to stand against the U.S. state’s terrorism against Black and Brown peoples. We call on our colleagues to join us in demanding redress and restitution, with expediency.

As Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston is known to have said, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.” We will not be silent. For members of the American Anthropological Association to be silent at this time given our discipline’s historic complicity in establishing the current order, and when we have the means to make a difference, is criminal.

To this end

1. We call on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association to issue a formal statement that condemns the heinousness of these crimes and calls on our academic guild to more forcefully tackle the problems brought on by racism and racial profiling. We ask that the Executive Board make every effort to make this statement accessible to the general public through mainstream media outlets so the discipline’s stance and investment in these efforts can be widely known.
2. We call on our colleagues to join the ABA in challenging the power positions from which we produce anthropology.
3. We join with other anthropologists, and stand in solidarity with people from around the country, in calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to review the use of force by police and to make a commitment to working for the eradication of racism and racialized state violence.

AAA Section Assembly Motion on Anti-Black Violence in the USA (5 December 2014)

The Section Assembly of the American Anthropological Association is outraged by the failure of the Ferguson and Staten Island grand juries to indict the police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the dismissal of the case against the officer who killed 7 year old Aiyana Jones.  In the hundred days since the murder of Michael Brown, police have also murdered 12 year old Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Darien Hunt, Aura Rain Rosser, Tanisha Anderson, Roshad McIntosh, Akai Gurley, Vonderitt Myers, and Rumain Brisbon, among others – all unarmed. These incidents reflect a blatant disregard for the value and dignity of their lives and the communities in which they live. These events are representative of a broader U.S. history of systematic anti-black violence, dating back to the enslavement, lynch laws, and the prison-industrial complex that affects black children, men, women and gender queer people.

As members of an academic discipline with the distinctive history of establishing the language and “science” of race, which has been used to justify settler colonialism and slavery, we understand the roots of this state violence. While U.S. ideologies hold that we are all equal under the law, this has never been the case, and in fact inequality has been structured into the justice system from the start, and is currently escalating via the militarization of local police forces.

To this end, we want the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association to: 1) make a formal statement condemning these activities and structural conditions, 2) create a Task Force to explore issues related to racialized police brutality and extra-judicial violence; and 3) call on the U.S Justice Department to review the use of force by police and to make a commitment to working for the eradication of racism and racialized state violence.

Action and Organizing at the AAAs

For many people, this year’s AAAs was like no other. Who knows when the last time was that so many members attended the organization’s business meeting? Energy and commitment was palpable, powerfully so at the business meeting as the vote on the above Section Assembly Motion followed a landslide vote to continue discussion and education on a possible boycott of Israeli education institutions. Political crises brought scholars together across fieldsites, generations, issues, and more. ABA member Bianca Williams (Colorado) speaks to this sense of momentum:

“The activities and energy at the AAA has truly reestablished my faith in our discipline. I worked diligently with folks from different walks this past week—ABA members; researchers who study police violence; anthropologists from all four fields; AAA Executive Board members; passionate graduate students; and scholars who have been committed to fighting anti-Black thought and practices–to ensure that anthropology clearly stated and demonstrated its investment in destroying the structural racism that facilitates an environment where Black lives are devalued. The die-in, the major presence at the general body business meeting, the support of senior anthropologists, and the ABA’s statement lets me know, and hopefully lets others know, that anthropologists are committed to fighting this struggle for the long term, as we have particular theoretical and methodological contributions to make. For me, this is what engaged anthropology looks like. Hopefully AAA 2014 was a call to action for all anthropologists.”

We are learning as we are acting too; a powerful image went up on Twitter of AAA President Leith Mullings (CUNY, The Grad Center) guiding younger scholars in the ways of AAA bureaucracy, on task forces and sections and motions, and how to get things done.

In reflecting on #AAA2014, Aries Dela Cruz (Rutgers) captured the sense of possibility for work inside the AAA that speaks to and with the outside world:

“This was my first AAA as a new anthropology student, and what it has taught me is that our discipline can be most effective and affective when we respond to a political moment. The public takes us seriously when we speak in a language that’s relevant to them, understands their grammar and modes of being. In addition to physically symbolizing racialized repression and state violence, the die-in laid the groundwork for the motion to be overwhelmingly passed by the section assembly.

All over the world, people can now see anthropologists as a resource they might be able to access in their local communities as allies, as people who can train them to conduct ethnographies of police departments to be able to be used in civil rights lawsuits.”

How can we best use the institutional spaces and structures available to us? How can we transform these spaces and structures as needed? One thing is for sure: our ethnographic knowledge, our teachings, our energy is needed now inside anthropology as well as outside of it. Next year in Denver….and between now and then, there is much work to be done.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/we-charge-genocide-movement-chicago-un/382843/

With thanks to Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Aries Dela Cruz, Marco Hill, and Bianca Williams for photos, stories, and help putting it all together. For more photos from the AAA Die-In, see Marco Hill’s website.