Anyone familiar with Guam’s history knows that it has had a tough go — centuries of punishing Spanish rule followed by a takeover by the United States in 1898, the same wave of expansion that added Hawai‘i and Puerto Rico to the US’s portfolio of territories. This was the beginning of the US’s militarization of the Pacific, which has been described in classic works like Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches, and Bases as well as more recent publications like Militarized Currents. The Center for Pacific Island Studies at UH Mānoa even has a class-room ready textbook on militarization and nuclear testing in the Pacific which I’d highly recommend you read or teach.

In the case of Guam, there is a large literature on resistance to military buildup, the impact of the 2009 decision to increase military presence on the island(including the fencing off of parts of the island) and how the rhetoric of liberation legitimates the military presence on Guam. Just google “Guam militarization pacific studies” and you’ll find plenty to read.

As someone who shares an island with the command center for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, I have many vets in my classes, and know friends who have served in the military. As a result I’ve come to appreciate how our troops suffer when our civilian leaders make terrible decisions — as they have for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s a tragedy that members of our volunteer army are in harm’s way because we have a president who can’t tell nuclear war from defending the wall from white walkers.

But it’s even more of a tragedy that people born and raised in Micronesia may have their lives, land, culture, and history obliterated in an instant because they had the bad luck of being strategically positioned. A strike on Guam would be genocide, culturecide, landicide — the literal erasure of a way of life that has survived for thousands of years. Even the Guam diaspora, as strong as it is, could never recover from that. This simply can’t be allowed to happen. And screaming at North Korea will make it more likely to happen, not less.

I had a chance to visit Guam recently for the biannual meeting of the Pacific History Association. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality of the conference organizers. Undergraduate volunteers staffed the airport lobby twenty four hours a day to make sure conference goers got to their hotel after a long flight. When I say twenty four hours a day, I mean it. I got off my flight at 1:30 in the morning and was greeted by a smiling college student who game me a lei, a bottle of water, my conference package, and arranged travel to my hotel. It was an amazing show of aloha. Real aloha. That smiling young student had her whole life ahead of her. Next month she may be vaporized, along with everyone else at her university.

I personally still feel that Kim and Trump are not stupid enough to do more than make threats. I believe that both leaders recognize that actual war is not in their best interests. I hope that a nuclear strike on Guam is still a rhetorical threat, not a real one. But every time this tension is ratcheted up, we move closer to a future where we will all have to live in a world polluted with radiation. Except for Chamorro people, who will not be living at all.

On Saturday, February 4, 2017, I gave a talk at Duke University as part of their “Precarious Publics” workshop. My invitation was to speak about public anthropology and the current political moment. The initial title of my talk, decided upon after the election but before the inauguration, was “Political Crisis and Scholarly Responsibility, or, Public Anthropology in the Time of Trump.” After the inauguration, things changed, and so did my title. Amidst not only the Muslim ban/immigration ban, but also the attack on climate change science, including the banning of the open, public sharing of scientific knowledge, and in some cases, the erasure of scientific research conducted during the period of the Obama administration, it was no longer sufficient to simply consider “public” anthropology. Instead, along with colleagues in numerous governmental offices and institutions—from the National Park Service to the EPA to NASA to the White House itself—it was time to think of a rogue anthropology. The new title for my talk, delivered on the sixteenth day of the Trump presidency (and posted here on the sixty-first day) was: “If On the Sixteenth Day … : Rogue Anthropology.”

The thirty-four minute video of the talk is below. It covers wide ground: ethnographic passages from my research on refugee citizenship with Tibetans in Toronto and Kathmandu, reflections on the political asylum process, testifying as an expert witness, a discussion of what public anthropology is, the writings of Ella Cara Deloria, Teen Vogue, questions of how something “counts” in academia, genealogies of anthropology as political intervention, social media as ethnographic space, the “new coevalness,” the anthropology of Trump and of lying, scientists and academics as political targets, fighting racism and white supremacism, and what the difference is between a public anthropology and a rogue anthropology.

Public anthropology is to be engaged. It is to communicate anthropological knowledge in a way that will be useful.

Rogue anthropology is to be enraged. It is to communicate anthropological knowledge in a way that will disrupt, stop, resist, refuse.

This is the moment we are in. It is not hypothetical. It is now. We need to act. And although my talk is grounded in anthropology (and in US-based anthropology at that), in its pasts and its possibilities, it is also intended to open to scholars in other disciplines. What political genealogies exist in different disciplines to both guide struggles and act as cautionary tales? What new genealogies and connections and actions do we need now? What can we do together?

This talk was part of the Precarious Publics seminar at Duke University, hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the Humanities Futures project of the Franklin Humanities Institute. Thank you to Ralph Litzinger and Anne Allison for the invitation to participate, the Duke community for their engagement, and to my fellow presenters for sharing their knowledge, experience, and passion with us all. Videos of their talks are available at these links:

Eileen Anderson (Duke), “Faculty Empowerment in the Age of Corporatization: Building a Union at Duke”

Marc Bousquet (Emory), “The Campus as Social Factory: Monetizing the Student”

Bianca C. Williams (Colorado), “Radical Honesty and Subjective Truths: A Black Feminist Politics of Teaching and Organizing with Emotion”

The Racist Gift of Immigration and Citizenship Bans, Again

Catherine Besteman

How can we understand Donald Trump’s executive order banning the entry of immigrants from Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Iraq, as well as all refugees? As an act of national security, the ban makes no sense. Rather, I read them as a racist gift to the white Christian alt-right that formed President Trump’s initial core base. The United States has a history of bans and color bars to entry and citizenship, about which we are rightfully embarrassed in hindsight. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to only white immigrants, a law that remained on the books until 1952. Entry to the US remained open to anyone, however, until the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the Johnson Reed Act of 1924, which imposed the first comprehensive control over immigration. The Act placed a cap on the number of people to be admitted, set national origins quotas based on the 1890 census for entry, and barred anyone ineligible for citizenship from entry. By using the 1890 census, the national origins quotas intentionally favored immigrants from northern Europe and restricted Jewish immigrants because of anti-Semitism and fears of Communist influence.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court declared ineligible for citizenship everyone from Japan to Afghanistan, with the exception of the Philippines, then a US territory, thus creating a new racial category of “Asian” to be universally banned. When comprehensive immigration reform in 1965 removed national origins quotas and bans, it was heralded as a rejection of racist barriers to entry and a victory for American values of justice, human rights, and fairness. A dog whistle to those lusting for white Christian hegemony, the bans are an initial step to return America to a time when Muslims were barred from entry and immigration to the US was controlled by and for whites only.

The Politics of Naked Cruelty

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

Since the end of the Cold War, global politics has been animated by “humanitarian reason”—a curious mix of violence and care used by nation-states to pursue their own geopolitical interests while ostensibly acting altruistically to provide aid.

No more.

Donald Trump’s refugee ban signals a dramatically new basis for global politics: a politics of naked cruelty.

Humanitarian reason carefully cloaked even its most violent acts in the treacle of human rights and emergency aid. The occupation of Afghanistan, the “liberation” of Iraq and the targeted bombing of Libya were all presented as military action taken to care for the impoverished, oppressed, or forcibly displaced.

Trump’s refugee ban makes no such pretense. Instead, it pretends it is indifferent to what happens to the millions of people who will be oppressed by their own governments, killed in conflict zones, or left to linger in the eternal limbo of displacement. “We have to take care of our own first,” is the constant refrain.

The politics of naked cruelty turns the humanitarian stereotype of refugees-as-innocent-victims on its head in order to justify state-sponsored mass violence against them. Already, Republicans in Congress have proposed that the US withdraw from the UN—which would mean cutting funding funds for housing and feeding displaced people. The right to turn away from starving refugees is baked right into that policy.

The only upside to the politics of naked cruelty is that it is naked. We no longer have to work to unmask the complex workings of neoliberal biopolitics. Power is now unmasking itself, which makes it fundamentally easier to oppose. That is why whether or not we care about refugees—and there are plenty of liberals willing to accept the sacrifice of refugees as unavoidable collateral damage as they focus on populations they deem more important—it’s worth continuing to fight the ban. It’s an obvious place to contest the underlying principle of the politics of cruelty: the right not to care.

Refuge, Refugees, and the Fears We Share

Tricia Redeker Hepner

What is daily life like under a regime that abuses its own people, disregards the rule of law, targets vulnerable and minority groups, and fails to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses unaccountable? How do reasonable people exist – and resist – in a society where those in power have created a nightmarish alt-reality and convinced others to go along with it? At what point does fear become action, pushing one to wager life itself against intolerable repression? These are precisely the dynamics I have explained – literally hundreds of times – to US immigration officials adjudicating asylum claims filed by people from Eritrea. While some of the fears that drive people to flee are indeed subjective and contextually specific enough to require translation, many are not. Being detained for one’s religious beliefs, beaten to death in prison, or subjected to torture require no culturally specific explanations to establish their moral repugnance or illegality. Rather, in explaining to US immigration officials the subjective fears of an Eritrean, or an Iraqi, a Kurd, a Syrian, or Afghan, what we are really doing is helping to narrate a story not about them but about us.

For “refuge” is really an elaborate ritual in which we affirm the predictability, integrity, tolerance, fairness, and inherent respect for justice and basic human rights we imagine characterizes America. Asylum in theory, if not practice, reiterates how America differs from the authoritarian, human rights-abusing states from whence refugees come. That is, until the day we wake up to realize that the refugee narratives we have helped tell for others, the subjective fears we translated as though alien, are really our own. Battered by xenophobia for decades, the US refugee system endures all-out assault by the very political dynamics it was once designed to subvert. In “Make America Great Again” we hear an echo of the lamentations of untold millions throughout time and space who have fought, died, and fled from dictatorships and wars that too often America helped create. But who will testify for us?

Sacred Grounds and Stolen Land, or, White Supremacists are Immigrants Too

Carole McGranahan

We Are All Immigrants. Make America Immigrate Again. Immigrants Built This Country. Signs such as these are prevalent in ongoing protests against Trump’s executive order banning individuals from seven countries from the US, including legally-approved refugees as well as legal permanent residents of this country. His action took place in the midst of other nefarious actions seemingly built on a platform of hate, lies, and destruction. Many have called his Muslim immigrant ban un-American, claiming this is not who we as Americans are. Others might disagree. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 are early precursors to this moment. However, we need to go back further, to the founding of the United States of America and to a different protest sign: #NoBanonStolenLand

Immigrants did build the USA, but they did so through the dispossession and subordination of other people: the millions of sovereign Native American peoples already living here. These were someone else’s lands, someone else’s sacred grounds. Immigrants also “built” the USA through slave labor. We are not all immigrants. Some of us are immigrants. Some of us are refugees, fleeing war and political violence. Some of us are descendants of slaves, sold and forced to “migrate” to this country. And some of us are native. Who are immigrants then? Those of us, including me, whose ancestors chose to come to this country. And: white supremacists. White supremacists are immigrants.

In his first days in office, advised by white supremacist Stephen Bannon, Trump has left Jews out of a statement remembering the Holocaust, has instituted a ban on Muslims coming into this country, ordered the Army Corps to expedite approval of the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation, and embarrassed just about everyone but himself by not knowing who Frederick Douglass was in his “speech” marking Black History Month. He followed this with the suggestion that the governmental Countering Violent Extremism program would no longer have a focus on white supremacist groups who have carried out violence in the USA, but will instead focus solely on Islamic communities.

I regularly testify as an expert witness for asylum applicants from Nepal and Tibet. Some of these are individuals who have escaped unimaginable political violence. They are looking for a safe haven, a place where they will not live in fear, a home for their children. This country is not perfect. Our history—past and present—is one that includes trauma and unjust war. Acknowledging injustice is a key step in working for justice now. One refugee here in the US told me that as his plane was descending into JFK, as he entered the fabled America for the first time, he looked out the window expecting the streets to be made of gold. He laughed as he told me this, at how as a young boy then man, he had taken this to be literal truth. Our streets are not paved with gold. Our myths obscure the often-painful realities of hierarchy and difference and violence in this country. We cannot let white supremacists and those who live in gold towers dishonor these sacred grounds or all of us for whom they are sacred.

Signs, Accusations, Fates

Nomi Stone

The morning after the Trump’s Immigration Ban went into effect, an Iraqi friend of mine, who now lives in America, sent me a picture of two trees that had just fallen in his yard: a prone cactus, spines pointing upward, and a larger trunk, a cracked triangle of earth around it. “It is a sign,” he said: “It is not safe here.” He, like many of the Iraqis I interviewed for recent fieldwork, had worked with American military personnel as a contractor and translator during the 2003 Iraq War, dreaming of a more just post-Saddam Iraq. Yet as Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation grew, many Iraqis I interviewed described how they increasingly faced accusations of being informants to the U.S. military. Returning to Iraq terrified many of my interlocutors. As the news of the Ban sank in, people wondered what might be next. One friend with a Green Card said: “As long as they don’t kick us out. We finally got here.” And another told me anxiously: “I think he [Trump] will eventually send all Iraqis back, even if they have Green Cards. Iraqis can’t feel safe anywhere.” In a moment of despair, a friend who had nearly been killed by a militia for working for the U.S. military told me that Iraqis who blamed him for his wartime choices said: “we deserve this, to be treated this way now that we’re here.” As I formulated my thoughts today, I began rereading Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, thinking of the image in one story of a miraculous compass, light as a butterfly in the hand of its bearer, that turns blood-red to signal a turn in the story and the fate of the characters.

More Than a #MuslimBan

Marnie Thomson

Trump has issued a 120-day ban on ALL refugees entering the United States. Supporters of this measure stress that it is 1) only a temporary ban, and 2) it will only last until the vetting system has been improved. But does the ban’s impermanence and stated purpose justify this order? No. Here’s why:
The vetting of refugees is already, to use Trump’s word, extreme. It usually takes two or more years to screen refugees. The screening takes place in their country of refuge, before they ever set foot on U.S. soil. The process includes many rounds of interviews with UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) personnel, an interview with the State Department, multiple background checks and finger print screenings, a review of the case by U.S. Immigration Headquarters, an in-person interview with the Department of Homeland Security, medical examinations, U.S. cultural orientation, and finally a multi-agency security check prior to departure. For more details, please see this White House infographic and this U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) testimony.

Refugee vetting works. Zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil have been perpetrated by refugees. A risk analysis of immigration terrorism conducted by the Cato Institute found that the chance of a refugee murdering an American in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3.64 billion per year.

Temporary bans have permanent consequences. While Iraqi refugee resettlement slowed in 2011, halting all refugee resettlement is unprecedented. While impossible to know all of the ripple effects, it is certain that the ban will cause further harm to innocent people who have fled violence and languish in the harsh conditions of refugee camps. It will not improve national security. It will increase the burden of refugee hosting on other countries and institutions, and it will cost the U.S. its recognition as a global humanitarian leader.

Republican Senators Rob Portman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham have already pointed to the irony that while refugees already undergo extreme vetting, this executive order clearly did not. Following its own language and logic then, this order should be banned until sufficient changes have been made to ensure that it is consistent with national interest.

AUTHORS

Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She is the author and editor of many books, including Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), and most recently, Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press, 2016).

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Geography at Indiana University. She wrote about refugee protection and resettlement problems in the May 13, 2016 issue of Science. Her book Unsettled: Humanitarianism and Displacement in the Republic of Georgia is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Tricia Redeker Hepner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Coflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and co-editor of African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights (Ohio University Press, 2015).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her current research is on political refusal and refugee citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora. In May, American Ethnologist will publish her article “The Anthropology of Lying: Trump and the Political Sociality of Moral Outrage.”

Nomi Stone is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Princeton University. Her second collection of poems, Kill Class (based on her fieldwork within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America) is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. Her article “Living the Laughscream: Human Technology and Affective Maneuvers in the Iraq War” is coming out in Cultural Anthropology this February.

Marnie Thomson recently defended her PhD thesis “Stories of Darkness: Congolese Refugees, Humanitarian Governance, and a Neglected Conflict” at the University of Colorado. In 2012, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review published her article “Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese Refugees.”

The ostensible reason for the executive order is to keep Americans safe from terrorism by keeping “radical Islamic terrorists” out of the United States. But there is no evidence that the  order will achieve this goal. It would not have protected Americans from the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by people from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Egypt. It would not have stopped the San Bernardino shootings, which were carried out by a US citizen and his Pakistani-born wife. It would not have protected the victims of the Pulse night club shootings from Omar Mateen, an American citizen with parents from Afghanistan. It would not have protected our children in Sandy Hook from Adam Lanza. It would not have protected parishioners in Charleston from Dylan Roof.

This is not the first time that airport security has been driven by a perception of danger rather than a sober assessment of risk. Back in December Kip Hawley, a former administrator of the TSA, posted an Op Ed describing the security vulnerabilities of the TSA Precheck program, and suggested several ways to tighten security in the program. But, as security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out, if the PreCheck program has been in place for over a decade and no terrorist has used it for a terrorist attack, shouldn’t we conclude that there are relatively few terrorists, and we’d be fine with less security, not more — or, at the very least, cheaper, smarter, and less burdensome security?

Clearly, Trump’s executive order does not make Americans safer. In fact, it may make us less safe. The Washington Posts reports that Jihadists groups are celebrating Trump’s order because it will throw moderate Muslims into the arms of extremists. But — and this is the thing — it makes some of us feel safer. Consider Renn (sp?) Brewster, quoted in a recent report from the BBC:

“This rule that President Trump passed, he did this to protect American citizens. The source of this is all the killing and the terrorist attacks on our countries that are causing these bans. We don’t seem to hear any thing about why we are doing this. We didn’t just decide to do these bans on travel for these seven nations that have a history of sending terrorists to different Western countries. There’s a reason why we’re doing this. Let’s stop the killing. Let’s stop the terror attacks. Then people can travel freely like we used to.”

There’s little in Brewster’s statement I can agree with. Trump’s executive order does not halt immigration to other Western countries, and will not make them safer. There is no extensive history of Iraq or Iran or any of the other five countries on Trump’s list sending terrorists to the United States. Why, then, do people like Renn Brewster believe this?

In fairness, it could be because they know something I don’t — I’m not omnipotent and could be wrong. I’m willing to be convinced I’ve got it wrong. But until that happens, it seems more likely to me that Trump supporters simply have the facts wrong. Remember, this is a country where many people couldn’t tell the difference between Chechnya and the Czech Republic when two Chechens bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. Clearly, we need more and better social science in school — and probably to read the news that shows up in our social media feeds a little more carefully.

But people believe that Trump’s order makes them safe not only because they lack a few key facts, but because of the coherent ‘webs of belief’ (as Geertz once put it) that connects all of the facts together. Culture is not an isolated bunch of facts. It’s a coherent and consistent pattern, structure, assemblage, or what have you. People who support Trump are not irrational. They have a cultural rationality. I personally think it is inaccurate.  The point is that changing minds requires engagement with real people and the entirety of their belief system, not scorn or derision or simple fact checking. Educating people about the dangers facing this country means altering the entire world view which people operate with, of which isolated facts are only a part. It also means realizing that we ourselves come from a culture with its own beliefs, and to recognize that there may be times when we could get it wrong ourselves.

Finally, it also requires understanding the emotional stakes people have in beliefs about terrorism. Anthropologists like Mary Douglas and Simon Harrison have pointed out that fear of strangers are rooted in concerns that the body politic might be polluted by external sources of danger. Anthropologists used to have a little cottage industry explicating the cultural logic of these beliefs and their emotional power. Today, however, we have been put out of work by ‘alt white’ white supremacists, whose racist ideology makes explicit the logic of purity and boundedness that was once unconscious.

There is a lot more to say about Trump’s executive order — that it was poorly executed, cynically designed for political gain, and cultivates a public atmosphere of ignorance and fear in order to make our democracy more pliable and subject to tyranny. American anthropologists can and should push back against the order, which is opposed to both our interests and our values. But most of all, we need to use the findings and methods of anthropology to understand the difference between what must be done and what will make us feel good. Only then will we have the ability to make hard decisions well, and be able to engage with our fellow citizens to convince them that we have far less to fear than Donald Trump wants us to think.

Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World seems to me the most influential book to have gone through the awards process at #aaa2016 this year. Not only did it win the Bateson and Turner prizes, it was  a nonfiction pick from Kirkus, and also got nods from Flavorwire, Times Higher Education, and the Northern California Book Reviewers. It might be argued that these successes come from the book’s release date, which allowed it to be reviewed in 2015 and 2016. It could also be that in this era of presidential politics predicted by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the World the book seems particularly salient. But honestly: given the book’s prominence in the intellectual life of the discipline — by which I mean the social media I read — it’s hard for me at least to think of any other book of 2016 that had the immediate impact of Mushroom. 

When we look back at the history of the discipline, Mushroom will epitomize much of our current moment: The Haraway-inflected, Kirksey-aligned focus on multi species entanglement. The Butlerian focus on precarity. The Biehl and Cohn-esque stark black and white photos of people staring out of frame. And of course the funny, touching, humble, defiant, insightful writing. Even those of us who have issues with the book (like me) ca’t deny that this book is about where the discipline is now?

But if The Mushroom Book is the epitome of the year of the monkey, will it still be relevant to the year of the rooster? Mushroom is written from a place of curiosity about our current dilemma by someone alarmed by our present condition but, to be frank, not immediately imperiled by it. I suspect that this affluent, puzzled subject position is one of the reasons the book so successfully reached the liberal middle brow Kirkus crowd.

But has Donald Trump killed Anna Tsing? That is to say, could our situation be so dire now that the anthropology of the future will find quizzical enquiries into the Matsuka diaspora luxuriously irrelevant? Could it be that ten years from now — as an ocean of adjuncts scramble to sign the loyalty oaths necessary to teach a few courses at the University of Phoenix in locations both free of radiation and above water — we may look back on Mushroom as the last beautiful flower opened in the long, late afternoon of our discipline’s descent into night.

I hope not. But I can’t help feeling that anthropology (especially in the US) will move to an angrier, less experimental place. Didn’t a similar shift occur after 9/11, when we moved from an Appaduraian wonder at frictionless global flows to a more disillusioned focus on power, the state, and governance? Of course, in every age there is always someone studying some approach or other. But collectively, and in a general way, I do feel the discipline changes focus as it calibrates to its broader context. It might be that in the year of the rooster anthropology’s center of gravity shifts away from the mushroom.

I don’t want to create a false equivalency. There is a very important difference between a political party which relies on minority votes and one which tries to suppress them. There is an important difference between a party which engages in dog-whistle politics to win over swing voters and a party for which such voters are their electoral base. But that doesn’t get us away from the fact that – in American politics – we are always talking about relative racisms. Many of those supposedly racist voters voted for Obama in the last election, and many minority voters handed the election over to Trump in their state simply by staying home on election day.¹ I don’t write this because I want to assign blame, but simply to illustrate how crude a tool “racism” is when trying to make sense of this all. So, if racism can’t help us, how do we talk about this phenomenon which is so central to contemporary politics?

It is not an easy riddle to solve, but one important part of the solution can be found in in the writings of Michel Foucault. Just a part of the solution, mind you, but for my own thinking on the matter it has been key. For that reason I was very happy when a bunch of anthropologists announced that they wanted to read read Michel Foucault’s lecture eleven in Society Must Be Defended as a means to think through “the interplay of sovereign power, discipline, biopolitics, and concepts of security, and race” on inauguration day. This is because the concept of biopolitics is a very useful addition to the analytical toolkit we have for talking about the diverse phenomenon grouped under the term “racism.” As with any such analytical tools, the benefits of highlighting certain features necessarily obscure others, and there are entire books written to try to sort out exactly what is lost and what is gained by using these tools; however, today I would like to simply focus on one aspect of this lecture which has been particularly useful to me: Foucault’s use of the term “population.”

There is a widespread belief that racism is a natural feature of human society. Talk to many a non-anthropologist about racism for long enough and they will likely shrug their shoulders at some point and say something to the effect that “Well, ever since the dawn of humanity we have always thought that people in the next village didn’t bathe and slept with their daughters.” This naturalization of racism is pernicious because it depoliticized racism and makes it seem like a byproduct of human character rather than a deliberate strategy of rule. Foucault’s notion of a “population” does a lot of important work in correcting this precisely by focusing attention on how racism became a “positive” force in the construction of the modern state. Note that “positive” here is not meant to imply something good, but rather something that has the power to actively shape the world. If racism were simply a feature of humanity than the role of racism in politics could only be negative. That is to say, modernity would be characterized only by the progressive removal of racism from politics rather than by a constant search for new ways to institutionalize racism into the very fabric of our institutions. At the same time, however, it is precisely because there are aspects of the concept of “population” which are seen as serving the greater good that it is so successful a strategy for the perpetuation of racism.

Foucault puts it this way:

racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship . . . The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.

Thinking about populations involves a qualitative shift in the nature of state power, because it requires the state to “intervene at the level” of the kinds of general phenomenon that are indicated by “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures” in order to “optimize a state of life” for the population as a whole. This is a new kind of thinking, obsessed not with the good of a select few, but the good of the “average.” Even if such thinking ultimately serves the interests of the few, it is crucial to understand that these interests are filtered through the ideology of the population as a whole and the importance of those few is interpreted in terms of the contribution to the greater good.

Foucault is concerned here with the Holocaust and the Nazi regime, but the ideas are just as usefully applied to the colonial encounter, or to the prison-industrial complex. In 1871 the British colonial government in India passed the Criminal Tribes Act which began the process of listing entire communities as “ born criminals ” subject to restrictions on their movement and eventually led to their internment in labor camps. With over two hundred different communities registered as so-called “Criminal Tribes” (now referred to as De-notified Tribes or DNTs) under this act, it doesn’t make sense to think of them as a “race,” but as I argued in an 2013 post on this blog, the logic of their oppression today is very similar to the kind of racial profiling African Americans are routinely subject to in the United States.

The concept of population also helps us discuss the concept of a “Muslim registry” without resorting to the concept of “racism.” As I said above, using a population highlights some aspects of a problem while obscuring others. Certainly there is a strong racist component to “flying while brown” that mustn’t be ignored. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that Islam is a religion and not an ethnic group. Actually, considering the wide diversity of religious practices that go under the name of Islam, it might be even more accurate to refer to it in the plural, but the logic of the War on Terror has served to impose its own reality upon the world such that all that diversity is subsumed under the logic of a “population.” It is precisely because “Society Must Be Defended” that we have no-fly lists which have a disproportionate number of Muslim names on them, that we have surveillance of American Muslim communities, that we force Muslim immigrants to turn informers on their own communities in exchange for an expedited green card, that we routinely deny immigration benefits and citizenship to Muslims and those from Muslim-majority countries based on vague and baseless “national security indicators.” Oh, and did I mention that all of this was done under Obama?

The concept of racism is often used as a value judgement. As a way of diverting attention from our own complicity with the racist project of the modern state. The concept of a population helpfully puts the role of state projects front and center and lets us see clearly how deeply embedded we all are in this system. If we are going to fight the racism of a Trump administration we are going to have to get over our own sense of smug self-satisfaction and start asking some very hard questions. Foucault’s concept of population helps us start asking those questions, even if it doesn’t provide all of the answers.

“No hay mal que dure cien años — ni cuerpo que lo resista.” (Popular Puerto Rican saying).

“There is no evil that can last a century — nor bodies equipped to endure it.”

The last weeks have been a marathon (Trumpathon?) of despair, grief, resistance, and mobilization in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory. I’ve spent part of time having long conversations with younger activists — folks in their 20’s and 30’s — about their feelings of disorientation and anger at what seemed to many to be an impossible electoral outcome. One of most dangerous, hate-spewing, fear-mongering, and vulgar presidential candidates in the US history is about to take over one wing of the state apparatus. Whatever one’s take on the whys and wherefores of the 2016 presidential election results, the negative effect on many bodies, spirits, and minds is palpable and worrying. What to do in such a crisis with so many layers and consequences that could warp even further the American polity for two or three generations hence?

I am sure the strategies to confront Trump will be sundry and have multiple points of entry, pressure, and mobilization. All well and good, but this will not be not enough to sustain community activist folks who are in the target zone of reaction, abuse, and violence especially if they are subject to burnout and despair.  For some reason, Trump’s victory has called up the past for me in a way no other election has. When I was in my early twenties during the Reagan-Bush I era, I had a spiritual mentor who would regularly urge me to do what we now call “self-care” — lest I lose myself in the vicissitudes of the South Bronx communities I was working with and whose organizing I was supporting. During those many years living and working in the Bronx, I must have burned out about three or four times. After each burn out, my spiritual mentor would help me to pick up the pieces and try to give me some perspective on how to engage in struggle over the long haul. He would say: “Well, Edgar, you’re burnt out again, huh? Savor the grace, brother: at least once in your life you were on fire. Pity those who never were. Now, slow down, my son. Slow way down.”

The last couple of weeks have been a return to the themes of those South Bronx conversations of my young adulthood. Lessons learned? In times of great political and economic crisis, do the opposite of the temporal logic of that crisis — as Ignatius Loyola, one of my guardian ancestral spirits, would say: “Do the opposite (Agere contra).” Slow down in times of great upheaval and attend very carefully to the movements of political and spiritual desolation and consolation that animate your particular body-spirit and our shared body politic and local collectivities. Above all, make no life-changing decisions when you are in the grip of desolate feelings and your creative imagination is shocked into stasis or despair.

Slowing down does not mean suspending anti-Trump protest, mobilizations, and organizing. Not at all. Woe betide a people who allow Trumpism to proceed normally. Rather, slowing down means that we stop responding to the logic of manic urgency that the enemies of our freedom and liberation in this country expect us to mimic as a way of keeping us off balance and in turmoil. Rather counter-intuitively, Ignatius encouraged his early 16^th century followers to pray as if their efforts were theirs alone and not dependent on divine intervention and act in the world as if God was in charge alone doing what She wills. The ‘material’ kernel of truth in that Ignatian ‘spiritual insight’ is that one can find a space of creative imagination ‘interiorly’ that makes the ‘outer’ work not dependent on just one person’s or group’s efforts. The paradox here being that at times the work of social justice activism is entangled with a form of surrendering one’s willful sense of control to be aligned with the collective forces at play shaping the historical moment.

Surrender is not exactly a cherished key term in activist cultures and politics. But, the older I get, the more I’m convinced that surrendering can be a bridge or a clearing post to more efficacious and expansive organizing and activist work.  To put this another way: there are a plethora of lessons in the offing when one is a willing and self-reflective, as well as militantly discerning, bottom. For example, about a year ago, a few comrades and I decided to convene a meeting of Latino gay, bi, queer men who were known for their committed activism, organizing, popular education, and teaching skills. As we organized the event, the exact agenda for the meeting kept slipping away from us. What was the goal of this national meeting? Were we going to start a national organization for Latino gay, bi, queer men? What was going to be the concrete payoff for such a gathering? In the end, we kept the agenda items to a minimum and spent the time we had getting to know each other for the first time or anew and holding a space open just for us to have tough conversations about our lives and the way forward for our folks. We did what Susan Sontag would have deemed the anterior affective/political work that keeps us from unleashing the liberatory projects we need and keenly desire. In the end, we spent two and half days asking ourselves one question: how do we heal collectively while we undertake the tasks of revolutionary work that is the only sure path for our communities?

Revolutionary praxis is a paradoxical double move: a community searches for the tools of its own healing from the structures of violence that delimit its freedom and life chances while in the full confidence that there is nothing wrong with them — not a damn thing wrong with them, but the system, as they have lived it, must be transformed root and branch if they are ever going to achieve a full flourishing that many of us call being a human or, to put it more sharply, what freedom might feel like in our bodies/spirits. This work of healing community-building and liberatory activism and organizing requires a slow tempo to counter the commodified and rapid-fire pace of this particular moment of crisis in American racialized capitalism. It also requires collective structures of dialogue and careful discernment of the signs of our times and the seeds of hope contained in the Trumpian disaster in the making.

Dont Rhine, a Los Angeles-based popular educator and militant sound artist/activist, reminded all of us recently of the necessity of both revolutionary slow down and collective discernment when he wrote in response to Trump’s presidential win: “People newly radicalized in the moment will come to a movement as long as it demonstrates an ongoing capacity to take critical action. Newcomers will STAY in a movement as long as there is the space to reflect deeply on experience; the experience of crisis and the experience of taking action. The pedagogical disposition—an attitude of listening, inquiring, and testing our learning through action—converts rushed panic into slow but intensive deliberation. It subordinates action to reflection. It sees action as a prelude for thinking and not the other way around. It safeguards the relationship between the horizon and how we get there. And it embodies the interdependence of political education with organizing.”

Rhine is spot on when he urges that “rush panic” be worked through into “intensive deliberation.” This idea aligns with the late community activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs’ notion that “staying in place” may be the most radical thing any of us can do in the age of globalization. It is my contention that this insight is as much about about time as it is about space. Further, she argues that people interested in building social justice not only live differently in relation to space and time, but they also “grow their souls.” Not the soul as an individual possession somehow embedded in a the dynamic materiality of corporeal life, but rather that singular building and binding energy that emerges when people get into motion for their mutual self-development in collective freedom projects. Obviously, there’s tons of work ahead of us as Trumpism goes to Washington and beyond. So, let’s slow down, reflect, construct healing freedom projects of our collective crafting, and slowly destroy the barriers to the emergence of something like human love unleashed in the service of justice.

Shaun King’s Twitter timeline this past week was just one indication of what these election results portend: a surge of racist, bigoted attacks across the country. This election has empowered and emboldened many people to express their contempt, disdain, and hate. According to local news reports, a Muslim woman at San Diego State University was attacked and robbed by two men who made comments “about President-elect Trump and the Muslim community.” This incident took place at 2:30 pm on Wednesday (November 9th). In a separate incident on the same day, a swastika and the words “Heil Trump” were painted on the sidewalk at a UC San Diego bus stop. 

I mentioned the events in the San Diego area because that’s where I’m from. I grew up there and still consider it my home. But I’m also highlighting San Diego because it’s in the heart of a “blue state” that did not vote for Trump, and yet it’s important to realize that these kinds of hate-fueled events are not isolated to certain parts of the country. This is not just something that’s going to affect other people, communities, and places. No regions of this country are immune to the effects of this election, despite what we tell ourselves. Denial will get us nowhere. Some places, of course, may be far worse than others.

Here in Kentucky, where I am currently living, many people are worried and fearful as well. The day after the election was a long day. I teach on Wednesdays, so I was on campus by mid morning after staying up until about 4 am. On campus, some people seemed exhausted and worried, others seemed unfazed by the election results. Many were hard to read. My class was quiet that day. It was a strange, tense day. My wife Veronica, who is also an anthropologist, dropped by to pick me up from campus that afternoon. We decided to go to grab take-out dinner at one of our favorite restaurants here in town.

I stayed in the car with our son and Veronica ran in to pick up our order. When she came back, she turned to me and said that people were talking about Trump and the election. I asked her what they were talking about. She said there was a non-white family sitting at one of the tables. A mother and father in their mid to late 40s and their teen-aged son. They were in the middle of a conversation about the election, and the son was telling his parents about something that had happened at school. The teenager was concerned about what he’d seen and was trying to tell his parents just how bad things were. They seemed shocked or in disbelief about what their son was telling them. Then the waiter came over and brought them their food, and the father asked him if they have been talking about the election too. The waiter said yes, and that two of the waitresses who worked there were really upset about it. He also said that two of the people who work in the kitchen—both of them recent immigrants—are really concerned, and they asked him if they should think about packing their bags and leaving. The father immediately said “No no no—people are exaggerating, they don’t need to do that…it’s not going to get to that point.” The mother also added “No, they don’t need to think about leaving.” Veronica said it was difficult to tell whether they actually believed that everything was OK, if they said these words to comfort their son, or perhaps if they were trying to convince themselves that it wasn’t an immediate threat. Reminder: none of these people were white.

These kinds of fearful conversations are happening all across the country. Other friends of mine are reporting similar concerns—about their safety, what’s going to happen to them, and the future of this country. I’m seeing these stories online, in the news, and through my social networks. People feel vulnerable and threatened. This was made possible by the large block of primarily white voters who just made the collective decision to put Trump into power. Their more than 60 million votes should, finally, put to rest the ridiculous myth that we live in some mythical post-racial America.

Yes, this is about race. But this is a conversation that many (white) Americans seem to want to avoid at all costs. This avoidance and denial tells us something in and of itself. One of the most common rebuttals I hear when someone points out the role that race played in this election is that it was actually about class and economics (those Rust Belt voters). Of course, yes, this election was about class, economics, gender, ableism, and a whole range of other interlinked factors. To assert that race was a key, primary factor is not to say that there were no other factors involved. The strong denial and avoidance of discussions about race are a crucial part of the larger problem. We should be asking why, when white nationalists like David Duke are loudly cheering for Trump’s victory, people are so quick to deny the role of race. In a recent essay that compares pre-Civil War America to our situation today, Sarah Kendzior writes:

The tyranny of the mob is enabled by those who refuse to recognize the threat, who rationalize the mob’s aims, or who – like the elites of the 1830s – avoid discussion of the racial enmity at its core. That same deep denial is occurring today, over 180 years later. We have a moral obligation to oppose it and document it, as others have in dangerous eras, in the hopes of negating threats to the most vulnerable.

This avoidance, which has been ongoing for decades, has led us to the present moment, in which white nationalist and white supremacist movements have not just resurfaced, but taken an overt hold of our political process.

Where is anthropology in all of this? This is not the part of my essay where I reassuringly argue that now is the time when we need anthropology more than ever. Despite what many anthropologists tell themselves, the discipline is not automatically anti-racist, and being an anthropologist does not exonerate one from the need to critically reassess their understandings of race in the US. This is the part of the essay, however, where I argue that it’s time for anthropologists to collectively re-examine our approach to questions of race, racism, difference, and diversity. This is certainly not the time to stand by in silence. There is much work ahead.

In the final pages of a book that was published back in 1998, Lee D. Baker asks, “Can anthropologists contribute to a meaningful progressive discourse in the United States? And why have anthropologists failed to bring the lessons learned abroad home to help expose problems in the United States?”[1] Eighteen years later, here in 2016, Baker’s questions remain just as relevant and as ever. It is certainly time for anthropology to make studies of race and racism a central, vital concern, one that requires deep scholarship and, ultimately, public engagement. Baker closes his book by pointing out that scholarly critiques of race had not, by that time, “successfully curbed the political force of ideas of racial inferiority.” Publications such as The Bell Curve made this all too clear. This is a political struggle, Baker argues, and anthropology is not exempt:

Anthropologists have consistently engaged in advancing a liberating political agenda in the United States even though … national politics often limits their impact. Anthropologists and other scholars must nonetheless continue to advance research that exposes the contradictions is U.S. society in an effort to reconcile the ideal of racial equality with the nagging, persistent, and seemingly perpetual forms of oppression.

Where to begin? Anthropology’s re-engagement with questions of race and racism should start with the work of all of the scholars—within the discipline and beyond it—who have been focusing on these issues for decades. This engagement can begin, perhaps, with a reconsideration of not just how we teach about race and racism, but whose voices we include in our classroom readings and discussions. A syllabus that emphasizes scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Vine Deloria, Jr. (among so many others) would be a good first step.

[1] Baker, Lee D. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954, pp. 227-228.