Anthropology and the racial politics of culture

Abstract

Questions"Are you a hegro? I a hegro too. . . . Are you a hegro?" My mother loves to recount the story of how, as a three year old, I used this innocent, mispronounced question to interrogate the garbagemen as I furiously raced my Big Wheel up and down the driveway of our rather large house on Park Avenue, a beautiful tree-lined street in an all-white neighborhood in Yakima, Washington. It was 1969. The Vietnam War was raging in Southeast Asia, and the brutal murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Bobby and John F. Kennedy hung like a pall over a nation coming to grips with new formulations, relations, and understandings of race, culture, and power. As members of the Red Power movement occupied Alcatraz and took up armed resistance in South Dakota, members of the Black Power movement occupied San Francisco State University, demanding that black studies be incorporated into the curriculum. Yet even militant leaders could do little to abate the flood of socalled race riots that decimated black communities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and no one could bring back the college students shot dead at Kent State and Jackson State.My father was a pastor of an all-white Lutheran Church, and my mother was an instructor in the still-experimental Head Start program. Busy preaching, teaching, and raising three kids, my parents had little time to be involved in any organized movement. As good white liberals, however, they wanted to contribute something, get involved, and try to make a difference. My parents believed that adopting a child might be one way to make a small but important difference during the turbulent 1960s. Initially, they wanted to adopt an American Indian child from the nearby Yakama Reservation, but, as the story goes, some of my parents' black PREFACExi