How far has anthropology come in becoming racially inclusive? In this article, we analyze an online survey of anthropology graduate students and faculty of color undertaken by the AAA Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology. Despite some progress, institutional and attitudinal barriers remain. We use the concept of "white public space" to analyze these barriers: departmental labor is divided in ways that assign to faculty and graduate students of color responsibilities that have lower status and rewards than those of their white counterparts.Colorblind racial explanatory practices-discourses that explain away racially unequal institutional practices as being "not about race"-are common. We argue that such practices make many anthropology departments feel like whiteowned social and intellectual spaces. We conclude by suggesting steps with which anthropology departments can create more inclusive social spaces that are owned equally by scholars of color and their white peers. [racism and anthropology, racial division of labor, diversity, race avoidance, white public space]
This article addresses the relationship between nationalist projects of subject making and capitalist political economy. Using the United States as an illustrative case, I suggest that the capitalist project of labor-force creation articulates with nationalist projects in the ethnoracial construction of workers and national subjects. Taking the situations of U.S. Jews and women as my main window, I propose that anthropologists should think of race as a relationship to the means of production and racial constructions of manhood and womanhood as the corporeal embodiments of that relationship, [race, nationalism, class, gender, Jews, capitalism] For the sake of those who came of age too recently to have spent their youth in revolutionary study groups reading all three volumes of Capital, it is worth explaining the roots of current concerns about the relationship of capitalism and race. Marxist predictions, especially about the shelf life of capitalism, have taken a beating at the hand of real world events in the 20th century. Capitalism was supposed to collapse because it has a central contradiction, a sort of tragic flaw, the socioeconomic equivalent of a lethal gene that was supposed to bring capitalism to its inevitable death. The falling rate of profit is supposed to be the somatic manifestation of that contradiction (see Brenner 1998 for a powerful revision of Marx). When profit collapses, the system implodes, and the international working class, which has been leaning on its collective shovel watching the whole process, digs capitalism's grave and gets on with the business of building socialism. But workers of the world did not unite against capitalism. Instead, such anticapitalist shovel brigades as there were in the fifties, sixties, and seventies were organized along lines of race, ethnicity, and, later, gender and sexuality but not really along class lines.When these movements weakened in the eighties and nineties, capitalism got stronger, socialism got weaker, began sleeping with the enemy and having capitalist babies, and now look at the fix we are in: Of the world's 100 largest economies, half are corporations. Walmart is bigger than Greece; Philip Morris is larger than Chile; Chrysler and Nestle are about the same size as Pakistan and Hungary, respectively. The six largest corporations in the world have revenues greater than the 30 countries containing half of the world's population. And, if Internet sources are at all reliable, the top 14 corporations in the world together have greater revenues than the U.s! treasury {Sierra Magazine 1998:17). 1 American ethnologist 27{2):237-256. 238 amerlcan ethnologist Capitalism now has a power perhaps greater than ever in its history to cross, even to dissolve, national boundaries. When one focuses on the global migration and circulation of people (Basch et al. 1993), the transition of formerly socialist economies to capitalism (Eyal et al. 1997), or the multinational nature of capitalist production and circulation of commodities, it seems reasonable to argue...
If, as a famous dead white European man once suggested, the point of studying racism is to change it, what can we learn about ending racism by studying it as whiteness? The first part of the paper summarizes some of the major issues and findings of recent studies of whiteness in the United States. It suggests that there is a hidden life at the heart of whiteness which is about preserving a set of specifically white constructions of masculinity and femininity, and that whites' lack of consciousness about this, and about white privilege in general, have undermined antiracist efforts. It summarizes some of the ways in which working-class white privilege is gendered, and how notions of masculinity and femininity are racial. Part II examines whiteness as ambivalence about the privileges and costs of whiteness as a useful entry point for understanding impulses to white antiracism.
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