Trayvon Martin, Race and Anthropology

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-07-22 05:15Z by Steven

Trayvon Martin, Race and Anthropology

Anthropology News
American Anthropological Association
2013-07-19

Leith Mullings, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
City University of New York
(and President of the American Anthropological Association)

On February 26, 2012, 28-year-old George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old African American teenager who, after buying Skittles and iced tea at the local 7-Eleven, was on his way home. Zimmerman claimed he was acting in self-defense, and the Sanford, Florida police force, after a brief investigation, refused to press charges. Following several months of demonstrations, Florida Governor Rick Scott (no fan of anthropology, as you may recall) assigned the case to State Attorney Angela Corey, who charged Zimmerman with 2nd degree murder. A year and a half after the killing, on July 13, 2013, a virtually all-white (and all-female) jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin (see journalist Charles Blow for an excellent discussion of the systemic racism that brought us to this moment). Though prosecutors, many journalists and large segments of the public saw the case as a quintessential example of race profiling—there is ample evidence, many believed, that Zimmerman profiled the teenager because he was a young Black man—during and after the trial both teams of lawyers and the jurors tripped over themselves proclaiming that neither the murder nor the subsequent not guilty verdict had anything to do with race. How do we explain these startlingly different responses as to the role of race?…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

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Call for Papers: Association for Feminist Anthropology Sessions

Posted in Anthropology, Forthcoming Media, Live Events, United States, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers, Women on 2012-02-09 02:42Z by Steven

Call for Papers: Association for Feminist Anthropology Sessions

American Anthropological Association
2012-02-07

Posted by Josyln O.

The Association for Feminist Anthropology welcomes sessions to be considered for inclusion in AFA’s programming for the 111th AAA Annual Meeting, to be held November 14-18, 2012 in San Francisco. The AAA meeting theme this year is “Borders,” so AFA particularly welcomes panels that take up “borders” from a feminist anthropological perspective. Various approaches to the theme include papers and sessions that might explore:

  • Borders/collaborations/intersections between feminist anthropology and other scholarly spaces from within and beyond anthropology: critical race studies, queer studies, and/or women’s studies; linguistics and genetics; political science, geography, environmental, and/or policy studies; migration and immigration studies and/or economics and archaeology and/or ethnography; biology/history/cultural studies; masculinity and/or gender studies; educational psychologies and social work; etc., etc., etc.
  • Existing or potential conversations/alliances/engagements between scholarly anthropology and everyday activism
  • Geographical, political, and ecological borders and the people who move across and re-define them: histories/archaeologies/economies of trade, trafficking, and/or transnationalism; refugees, resettlements, and asylum seekers; multiple and multiplying citizenships; migration, immigration, and diasporas; etc.
  • “Borders” and “borderlands” in terms of identities: liminal; queer; mestizaje; mixed-race; transgender
  • The “in between” scholar working across/between/among disciplines; conducting research and participating within communities; “insider anthropology”; Lorde’s concept and Harrison’s theorizing of the “outsider within”

We are especially interested in sessions that take advantage of the meeting site of San Francisco by involving local activists, practitioners, and policy makers, whether they are anthropologists or not. If you have questions about the details of registration for non-anthropologists, please let us know…

For more information, click here.

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Anthropology at the Washington Meeting for 1911

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2012-01-20 00:31Z by Steven

Anthropology at the Washington Meeting for 1911

Science Magazine
Volume 35, Number 904 (1912-04-26)
pages 665-676
DOI: 10.1126/science.35.904.665

George Grant MacCurdy (1863-1947), Assistant Professor of Archæology
Yale University

The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association was held in the United States National Museum, Washington, D. C., December 27-30, 1911, in affiliation with Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Folk-Lore Society. The attendance was good and the program exceptionally long and interesting. The most important features were the two symposia: (1) “The Problems of the Unity or Plurality and the Probable Place of Origin of the American Aborigines, ” discussed by J. W. Fewkes, A. Hrdlieka, W. H. Dall, J. W. Gidley, A. H. Clark, W. H. Holmes, Alice C. Fletcher, Walter Hough, Stansbury Hagar, A. F. Chamberlain and R. B. Dixon; and (2) “Culture and Environment,” discussed by J. W. Fewkes, Clark Wissler, Edward Sapir and Robert H. Lowie. The first of these two discussions is printed in full in the January-March issue of the Anthropologist, and the second will appear in the April-June issue. Dr. J. Walter Fewkes presided at the six sessions in charge of the American Anthropological Association; also at the single session of the American Folk-Lore Society, in the absence of Professor Henry M. Belden, president of that society. Professor George T. Ladd, vice president of Section H, was chairman of the single session in charge of the section. The social functions to which members of the affiliated societies were invited included: a reception by Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Woodward at the Carnegie Institution, a reception at the New National Museum, and the opening of the Corcoran Gallery of Art…

…Some Aspects of the Negro Problem: ALBERT ERNEST JENKS, University of Minnesota.

Immigration.—Since we have a serious negro problem is it reasonable that this problem be made more difficult by admission into the United States each year of an increasing number of un-Americanized immigrant alien negroes.

There are no United States laws against such immigration. Just short of 40,000 such persons have come to this country in the last ten years; in 1911 we received 6,721. They come from near at hand-three fourths coming from the West Indies. The West Indies have nearly 6,000,000 negroes, any of whom may come to the United States. America debars oriental peoples, not because they are inferior, but because they and their culture are so different from American people and culture. For the same reason we should exclude the “African black.” He should also be excluded because his admission is unfair to the white and also to the negro American-since he makes even more difficult one of America’s most perplexing problems.

Miscegenation.—There are two forms of negro-white miscegenation: (1) Legal marriage, permitted permitted in twenty-three states where the unions are largely between negro men and white women; (2) illegal, more or less temporary unions, usually between white men and negro women. Investigation in a certain area shows that 65 per cent. of the white wives of negro men are foreign born girls—usually of Teutonic peoples. Over two per cent. of children are born to these marriages. The result of both these forms of miscegenation is an increasing number of mulattoes cemented by color and prejudice to the negro race, while by inheritance they are endowed to a considerable degree with Anglo-Saxon initiative, will, ideals and desire for a square-deal—which, because of their color, they can seldom get. These mulattoes are the migrants in the north and west of the United States; they are more migrant than the restless, foot-free white American. The mulatto is the chief factor in the negro problem; the problem is bound to increase, then, in geographic area, in number of discontented negroes, and in its intensity, hand in hand with the increased flow of Anglo-Saxon blood into the veins of this new American man. All forms of miscegenation between the two races should be made a felony, punishable for one offence; and the father of children born to one white and one negro parent should be held to support and educate such children.

Who is a Negro?—The negro should be defined uniformly, so that there would be no question of the legal and racial status of any given person, no matter in what commonwealth he may be. To-day there is no such uniformity of laws.

Murderous Race Riots.—The white man ‘s passion against the offending, or suspected, negro is often nothing short of blood vengeance against the negro race. This is seen in the fact that assault against the virtue of a white woman is only one of some three dozen offences for which negroes are annually lynched. In many of these lynchings and burnings murder is not committed in the frenzy of the moment; the mob starts out to lynch or burn-the crime is premeditated. If America is to train her annual armies of immigrant recruits into law-respecting and law-abiding citizens, she must punish to the limit necessary all participants in murderous race riots.

Education.—Each negro child should have, so far as public and private schools are concerned, an equal opportunity with the white child to make of himself all that he is capable of being.

Investigation.—A commission should be selected to study every aspect of the negro problem. This commission might well be financed by private funds so as to keep it from the almost certain bias of politics and sectionalism…

Read the entire article here.

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RACE: Are We So Different?

Posted in Anthropology, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Social Science on 2010-03-06 00:04Z by Steven

RACE: Are We So Different?

A Project of the American Anthropological Association
2007

We expect people to look different. And why not? Like a fingerprint, each person is unique. Every person represents a one-of-a-kind, combination of their parents’, grandparents’ and family’s ancestry. And every person experiences life somewhat differently than others.

Differences… they’re a cause for joy and sorrow. We celebrate differences in personal identity, family background, country and language. At the same time, differences among people have been the basis for discrimination and oppression.
 
Yet, are we so different? Current science tells us we share a common ancestry and the differences among people we see are natural variations, results of migration, marriage and adaptation to different environments. How does this fit with the idea of race?

Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race.  The story of race is complex and may challenge how we think about race and human variation, about the differences and similarities among people.

Visit the project website here.

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Philosophical aspects of the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Philosophy, Social Science, United States on 2009-11-06 01:37Z by Steven

Philosophical aspects of the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’

Anthropological Theory
Volume 1, Number 4 (December 2001)
pages 445-465
DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228836

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

I apply philosophical analysis to the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ (American Anthropological Association, 1998) and the commentary on its earlier draft published in the Anthropology Newsletter (1997). Racial essentialism is the theory that there are distinct and general human biological traits that determine racial membership and cause the presence of specific racial traits. This theory is false, as is the belief that a taxonomy of human races, or race, exists. But the 1998 ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ fails to repudiate racial essentialism explicitly. Instead, the Statement denies that race determines culture or psychology and thereby misses the broad logical point that race cannot determine anything, because it does not exist. In the Anthropology Newsletter discussion of Kennewick Man, which appeared to be a debate about racial essentialism, contributors spoke past one another in confusing population-based measures of human diversity with race. The same confusion clouds contemporary concerns about the relevance of common-sense racial categories to medical diagnosis and treatment. Education is the solution to the public’s ignorance about the scientific foundation for its ideas about race. It is an empirical question whether such education will remedy racism or unjust treatment based on the false racial taxonomy. Although mixed-race categories are no more real than ‘pure’ ones, their acceptance may help unsettle the prevailing false taxonomy of race.

Read the entire article here.

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American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race”

Posted in History, Media Archive, Statements, United States on 2009-09-25 03:27Z by Steven

American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race”

1998-05-17

The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of “race.”  We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species….

Read the entire statement here.

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