First Encounters of the “Savage Mind”

My initial confrontation with the discomfiting title occurred mere weeks into my transition to graduate school, when I met a fellow PhD student who regularly writes for this blog. I remember my gut reaction to his suggestion that some of my thoughts about being an Indigenous woman in academia would make for insightful, provocative contributions to something called “Savage –”

I wasn’t cool enough to listen vinyl at the time, or there might have been a record scratch just then. Ouch. Did this new peer really just hurl a slur at me? I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time, or the only time, that I had experienced racism or discrimination as a Native woman in higher education, but it still stung. The term “savage” has a long, ugly, oppressive, and genocidal history in Native American and Indigenous communities.

From dictionary definitions to historical texts, to modern day slang, “savage” denotes a lack of restraint, inherent violence, primitive nature, or particular cruelty. These negative definitions are precisely why the descriptor was used to dehumanize Indigenous peoples in facilitation of a hallucinated “manifest destiny” in the first place. This “destiny” required a solution to the “Indian Problem,” which mostly meant getting us out of the way, an end goal that produced the mantra “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” (such a fun quote to learn as the only Indigenous person in your AP U.S. History class…). Because it is easier to exterminate animals than people, we were referred to as “savages,” building the perception that Indigenous people were uncivilized, wild, and cruel, and transforming our humanity into animality. There’s much less cognitive dissonance involved in committing genocide when you’ve got the refrain “savages, savages, barely even human!” musically reassuring you of your moral authority and justifying your crimes against humanity animality.

The Trouble with the Name

To be fair, no, my colleague had not intended to be racist, nor was that the intention of this blog when it initially donned such a moniker. As I have been repeatedly informed, the old name was drawn from European anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1962 work “La Pensée Sauvage,” translated into the English “The Savage Mind” in 1966. Understood as both wild flowers (pansies) and wild thoughts, the double-meaning was much less offensive in the original French (though I don’t doubt that some of my ancestors were derided as “sauvage” by early French fur trappers in the Pacific Northwest).

However, intention and impact do not hold equal weight when it comes to conversations about race and racism. Although Anthrodendum may not have intended to be racist when it first named itself “Savage Minds,” the impact was indeed the perpetuation of unchallenged racism. Sadly, I too often encounter anthropologists and other scholars who refuse to recognize the existence of racism and discrimination in academia. The unwillingness to even acknowledge this problem in the first place is what keeps our discipline from solving it.

What’s especially disappointing about the choice for the original name of Anthrodendum is the un-examined reason it is an engaging or interesting title. The “About” page states that “We liked the phrase ‘savage minds’ because it captured the intellectual and unruly nature of academic blogging.” While the name may have done just that, the reason that the titles of “Savages Minds” the blog and Lévi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind” are engaging is because they play off contradicting popular expectations of academia. There is an unspoken understanding between the author and the audience that “savage” is not a word usually associated with “us” (prototypical white anthropologists), and thus the observation that a normally “civilized” group of people can also be “wild” or “unruly” is clever and humorous.

Worse still is that the original title very publicly normalized and implicitly condoned the casual, uninformed (ab)use of the word “savage” by its readers. Malicious intent may be absent, but it is unarguably reckless for a blog whose purpose is to engage in public anthropology to utilize a racial slur while communicating with an audience who is very unlikely to be familiar with the source of the blog’s namesake.

Because the old name depended on stereotypical preconceptions to be clever and provocative, and because the aim of the blog is to engage the public with anthropology, “Savage Minds” did a huge amount of damage when it comes to reinforcing negative beliefs about of Indigenous peoples, regardless of the content of the blog itself. Such reinforcement adds further injury to injury. A historically marginalized group is once again oppressed and marginalized, not just by those in power, but by a discipline whose very roots are bound up in the (sometimes literal) desecrated remains of the people most exploited by its historical entitlement to the pursuit of knowledge. 

For these reasons and more, the name change is a welcome, though very long overdue, step in the right direction towards addressing the problems of implicit racism and colonialism in our discipline.  Indigenous scholars have enough to worry about in anthropology, and I’m happy that writing as a “savage mind” will no longer be one of them.

It’s all people could talk about at school. “When do you think they’ll announce it?” The conversation even veered into “Ferguson” in my seminar on reproductive health issues. It gave us a chance to talk about how #BlackLivesMatter is a reproductive rights issue, something I had hoped to discuss for the last several weeks.

Hours later, I was back home watching the local news on my television, @AnonCopWatch on my laptop, and listening to the STL Police Scanner. McCulloch’s speech, calculated from the beginning, was chilling, especially in the context of his background. No one was surprised. President Obama’s speech was a disappointment, as if he was running for re-election. The police moved in with smoke and then tear gas and we all know the rest of the story.

The Grand Jury decision has come on the heels of the murder of 12 year old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland police officer for carrying an Airsoft handgun without the orange tip, and I had just spent about a day fruitlessly arguing with people on Facebook about whether or not this was a “race issue.” Because I’m a sucker for being drawn into these things, I gave up yet another day of valuable time trying to convince a brick wall to bend.

The most astonishing part about the discussions that I’ve had is that half of the people with whom I sparred are trained in anthropology (and the other half, closet racist relatives; but you almost have to expect that). I apparently believed – naively so – that we (anthropologists) are on the same page, especially about things like structural violence (or vulnerability), governmentality, state-sanctioned violence, privilege, méconnaissance, social reproduction and so forth; I assumed that we could all discuss things abstractly in order to flesh out a conceptual framework of why the sudden rash of “justifiable homicides.” Nope. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and here’s why.

“Race is a biological myth.” The AAA should tattoo it on our faces when we buy lifetime memberships. We say it all the time and don’t pretend that you don’t get some satisfaction from the look of shock when your students hear this for the first time. The problem is, it lacks a very crucial corollary: “[But] race is a social reality.”

Another friend – a non-anthropologist woman of color – messaged me privately. “Why don’t your friends get it? Why do they insist on telling me that my experience as a black woman is wrong?” I told her: They are (or were) anthropology students. We are taught that “race is a myth,” and therefore it follows that race cannot be implicated in the issues that they were happy to identify as “structural” or “systemic.” They just weren’t willing to take the next step and see that even if the whole system is flawed, it affects people of color much differently than it affects white people; that parents of black children worry differently than parents of white children. Additionally, I told her, students of anthropology are implicitly taught that anthropology is done outside of the United States and sociology is done inside the United States, and so were aren’t exactly receptive to the idea of viewing “justifiable homicide” through an anthropological lens, and I’ll be damned if we even know what a sociological lens looks like. I suggested that some of my friends read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” and one friend replied that they didn’t need to read to learn about “the real world.” I assume “the real world” in this case means “America,” because as an anthropologist this person had no trouble reading literature related to their research.

Professors of anthropology, you need to sit down with your students and hash this out. I don’t need to tell you that if we deny the social reality of race, we will continue to reproduce this lacuna of empathy in the next generation of anthropologists. The “race card” can be a powerful tool for us. Don’t let anthropology persist in being a white public space.

I just read the Michael Brown post [by Uzma Z. Rizvi] while in a Black hair salon in East Oakland, where my African friend is getting her hair done (behold: transnationalism, diaspora!). I found the shirt pictured [above], worn by an older Black man exiting the salon, poignant in light of the article mentioning the Department of Homeland Security, and Prof. Rizvi’s statement about the inescapablity of being judged on the color of one’s skin. I wonder how many White anthropologists, reading what Prof. Rizvi has written about racism and the absence of benefitting from White privilege, are really willing to reckon with the implications of this admission, or care about the deep pain of racism they know they will never experience, especially in relation to racial profiling and brutalization by police–which as Prof. Rizvi rightly notes, occurs, especially to bodies coded Black, regardless of education and class (though low socio-economic status clearly exacerbates such racist encounters and outcomes).

In particular, I am struck by what Prof. Rizvi writes about the cultural character of resistance in the US, a theme which is worth problematizing in relation to the aforementioned shirt, pictured above.

I thank Prof. Rizvi for showing sincere solidarity with Michael Brown’s family, the residents of Ferguson, and Black Americans in general, as this statement of solidarity–within an acknowledgement of enduring anti-Black racism (versus an attempt to minimize or deny it) is something far too many anthropologists (i.e. White anthropologists) do not do, especially in relation to being honest about how often anthropologists share the very same anti-Black biases which make the murder of Black boys/men like Michael Brown and  Trayvon Martin, and Black girls/women like Renisha McBride possible–as well as the criminalization of Black people simply because of enduring stereotypes of Black people as violent subhuman animals and savages (as Dick Powis discussed in his response to Matt Thompson’s post on what constitutes a riot). In short, the slaying of Michael Brown did not occur in a vacuum: it is the product of larger structural inequalities and implicit biases which also exist in and are (re)produced by the academy.

The sad reality, as I have personally witnessed and experienced first-hand, is that many (non-Black, and especially White) anthropologists have extremely negative views of Black people overall, even as the discipline officially claims to be antiracist and rejoices, in self-congratulatory fashion, in publicly excoriating Nicholas Wade and identifying only the most blatant and explicit enunciations of racial inferiority and racial animus as ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’.

But what happened to Michael Brown, is also about White supremacy, including everyday practices that all anthropologists participate in which normalize devaluing Black lives and seeing Black people, especially the darker-skinned they are, as less human, less intelligent, more violent and criminally-inclined. (Yes, the Savage Slot persists.)

It is not just Prof. Rizvi’s students who are blind to ‘quotidian racism’. Plenty of (White) anthropologists are also blind to these ‘everyday practices of White supremacy’ (such that calling out behavior or individuals as ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ comes to be misrecognized as being ‘mean-spirited’, because forthright critique of such everyday practices of White supremacy in the US happens far too little in Anthropology and is rarely the subject of anthropological ethnographies). The ability of so many of the author’s White students to believe we live in a postracial world, and their inability to be clued in to the racism people of color constantly face, regardless of class or education, is very much a product of Anthropology’s own ‘race avoidance’ as discussed in “Anthropology as White Public Space?”: ‘We’ don’t really write the books, articles, ethnographies about daily racism in the US, about daily manifestations of White power and privilege that would (re)educate these students, or ‘the public’ more broadly. (Public Anthropology?)

So I applaud the genuine solidarity and antiracism education in which Prof. Rizvi is engaged. I just wish more anthropologists were doing this work. And forcing a conversation on the implicit (anti-Black) biases of anthropologists themselves, as well as the daily practices of White supremacy and anti-Black racism which are a part of academic life, just as they are a part of American life more broadly. And please note that I did not write ‘US life’ because this issue of anti-Blackness, White supremacy, and racial control of people of color via (militarized) policing is not limited to the US, but is characteristic of ALL the ‘post-slavery’ states in the Americas. (Yes, buzzwords/themes like ‘globalization’ and ‘transnationalism’, which anthropologists usually like.) The issue is the ongoing legacy of racialized slavery, genocide, and dispossession in the Americas, and the racial logics of humanity and sub-/non-humanity with which we continue to live, and die, such that some people–like Michael Brown, by virtue of his Blackness–are always already seen as disposable non-persons, bare life, and those who Anthropology has long spoken for while often refusing to listen to as equals.

So yes, returning, recursively, to the shirt/photo above, it is worth thinking about the issue of resistance, raised by the author in the post. Whose resistance is even recognized as a political act in the first place, and whose is instead seen as the dangerous rioting/violence of subhuman animals who must be controlled and silenced, by any means necessary? Moreover, the anger currently being expressed by Black people and Black communities is a thoroughly anthropological issue: as anthropologist Catherine Lutz reminds us in her book Unnatural Sentiments, “emotion is an index of social relation”. Constantly denying Black people, especially poor and working-class Black people, our right to anger over being constantly dehumanized as nothing more than violent animals against whom the police and others/society must defend itself (yes, this is a conscious Foucault reference) is dehumanization in and of itself, reinstating the very racist logics that Nicholas Wade advocates about Black people as constitutionally less intelligent and more violent. This is exactly the racism that anthropologists claim they repudiate and do not want to support. When will our words match our actions?

Post-Script: I wrote this comment before reading Brittany Cooper’s In Defense of Black Rage, over at Salon. In it she articulates many of the same points I have articulated here and elsewhere, for years, often to be met with some version of ‘shut up and stop complaining about your “personal issues” no one cares about or racist abuse I am not going to believe’. Such a response is easy to give when you will never be on the receiving end of racial profiling and police brutality, and when the pain of racial discrimination is only an abstract concept and not an embodied experience. I think what is most important about both Prof. Cooper’s post, as well as Prof. Rizvi’s is, their willingness to acknowledge the real pain that racism causes those who have to endure it, suffering which those who don’t have to experience (anti-Black) racism all too often neither want to hear about or believe. In particular, I want to draw attention to what Prof. Cooper says about how Black rage scares White people. (But why would anthropologists, or anyone else, expect black people to be alright with being dehumanized, seen as animals, and treated as second-class citizens if human beings at all? Why should such racism produce something other than anger/outrage? And shouldn’t anthropological empathy be capable of understanding such anger, instead of summarily dismissing, pathologizing, and silencing it? If the good ethnographer can have sympathy for Nazis, why not Black anger too?) But Coopers’s discussion of why Whites fear Black anger is one I have found few White anthropologists willing to have. Why?

It is easy to talk about racism when it is displaced onto others. This is one reason it is so attractive for anthropologists to excoriate Nicholas Wade. But it is much harder to talk about the racism that involves ‘us’, admit to the fears Brittany Cooper writes about, admit how and why (White) anthropologists have them too, and admit the kinds if life-endangering, brutalizing abuse and dehumanization such racism makes possible – yes, even from anthropologists who believe themselves to be ‘past racism’. If anthropologists, as a discipline, truly want to be engaged in an antiracist project contra people like Nicholas Wade, they, too, will have to be honest about the fear/anti-Blackness of which Brittany Cooper writes – however uncomfortable and difficult looking in the proverbial mirror may be.

When I write, there’s a slight lag- a-whatever– space-between when words strung together into phrases or sentences are transmitted onto the page with fingers trained as intermediaries.  A right hand injury made me identify this pause as I became more conscious of various aspects and levels in my writing. Not being able to type gave me a new relationship to interludes in my process.

I started to learn a dictation program that made me grouchy. It insisted I follow its rules, stripping off the last vestiges of an old accent and making me pronounce certain words the Anglo way so it recognized them. Fortunately, it also decidedly made me very happy and even freer: in some ways this limitation helped open me to just what it is that I want to write at this particular point in my life and most importantly, for what reason.

The basics matter, so here they are: I am tenured faculty member at Wesleyan University, a black woman from Haiti who speaks her mind and used to describe herself as a performance artist masquerading as an academic or an accidental academic. I have never been conventional (not as a grad student or pre-tenure faculty) and am certainly not about to make a u-turn now. More often then not, I choose to honor the verve that drives my quest to confront the visceral. All of that to say, I take risks. My writing has always occurred within intersections from theory to form. As I have yet to meet a human subject who lives life along disciplinary lines, I don’t usually fret about it.

[Fair warning: Unless you consider yourself something of a misfit trying to navigate this terrain, this may not be for you.]

What I have found over the years is that the more aware I am of both the broader professional and personal contexts within which I write, the easier it is for me to write.  Looking back, I recall those moments when I was a dissertating grad student battling the paralysis that came with the all-too-common fear of being a first-generation everything working to make space for herself as an expert in a discipline, where decades later minorities are still underrepresented. I made it through and faced said fears again when writing the book. At one point I was truly stuck, spending hours at the office unable to write anything new. I got over this block and owe the deluge that followed in part to the senior white male colleague who once bellowed, “You can’t give a fuck! You will never write if you are worried about your critics. You will never write!”

His brazen privilege reminded me of previous conversations with my advisor and mentors about professional paths, theoretical lineages and decisions concerning what it means to do reflexive anthropology. Be prepared for the navel-gazing backlash [check!], the silencing [check!], the charge that such work is soft or illegitimate [check! check!] and too political [check!]. I embraced the reflexive turn precisely to consider both what I had learned and how I came to that knowledge. Moreover, I deploy reflexivity to expose what I like to call the “social luxury of whiteness” since I certainly do not benefit from the convenience of being unmarked as Trouillot so aptly put it. (It’s all in the book.) A post-Zora interventionist, as I call myself, this approach continues to suit my projects and my chosen interlocutors.  Yet, the old fears and issues still come up (there are more evaluations and even more gatekeepers) though I confront them much quicker as I get older. Once they are out of the way, other impediments to my writing tend to be rather practical such as career plan, enough time, the right conditions and a healthy body and hand.

When I was a junior faculty member, muddling through the unfair extra burden of my joint-position in AfAm and Anthro, there was a little protection, which allowed me to carve spaces and get the first book done. Nothing, however, had prepared me for the gendered, racialized and classed division of affective service labor post-tenure that ultimately determines who gets to pursue a future as an intellectual and who is expected to be faithfully committed to institution building.  That’s the primary reason fewer women and minorities are full professors. Indeed, in more ways than one, I almost became a casualty of the ivory ceiling.

Luckily, the performer had been slowly removing her mask over the years while a devastating earthquake forced a detour from my second project luring me into new directions. Listening to my muses and responding to the call of 1/12/2010 inspired experimentation with different forms of writing and expression. The situation in Haiti—the reason I became an anthropologist—rendered the stakes the highest they have ever been during my academic career. I embarked on an urgent public anthropology spree, penning opinion pieces, blogging and performing both for sanity and because I could offer another perspective. In the end, I produced non-traditional works that were not part of the “original” “plan,” (as if there was one), but which now comprise an unconventional book of essays and blogs.

These days, I am no longer split between a program and a department. The structural conditions that once impeded me, which practically required a survival guide, no longer exist. For the very first time in my entire career as faculty, I have unencumbered time to be contemplative, thus ready to engage a work that has been on the back burner as I develop installments of a large-scale performance project. I find it useful and fun to think about my writing time as studio time.

Conditions need to be optimal yet flexible. Now that I have to rely on the disciplining microphone to capture my thoughts, I try to accommodate my very specific habits. I opt for regular, longer slots of time when the outside world cannot intrude. Turn off all electronics except iTunes. I need music especially when starting something new. I have been listening to the same Mozart boxed set for over 25 years. Thank god for the invention of the compact disc. Yet, I prefer the atmosphere of a noisy café when revising. I have playlists for different phases of writing with everything from Bookman Eksperyans to Awolnation. Decades ago, I realized that I am not a linear writer, but more of a quilt maker. I am content when I produce chunks. I have also learned to not berate myself if I can’t come up with anything. There are works by certain poets and art books near my desk (or in the moveable studio bag), which I need and reach for when words are not whirling out of my head as I face the screen.  As long as I am present in the space and in conversation with artists or even in silence, I now consider myself writing.

Viewing writing as a practice that requires my full attention has helped me cultivate a healthier and more integrated relationship to my discursive and expressive meditations.  It’s not a chore; I look forward to the process.  As I have to manually (and painfully) scroll pages, my injured hand reminds me why the work I do must be of deeper significance, why it must truly matter to me and also be full of inspiration.

[Written during the 123^rd birthday of Zora Neale Hurston, my title is in part a riff of her controversial 1938 essay “Art and Such” and the only musical episode (7^th) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the series’ sixth season.]