Mark Anderson

From Boas to Black Power

Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Mark Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (2009).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Mai 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 160mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 544g
• ISBN-13: 9781503607286
• ISBN-10: 1503607283
• Artikelnr.: 56787680

Autorenporträt

Mark Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (2009).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Prologue: The Custom of the Country
chapter abstract
The Prologue uses a discussion between anthropologist Margaret Mead and
writer James Baldwin, recorded in A Rap on Race, to foreshadow core themes
of the book: the anthropology of race and racism and its legacies; Black
Power; anti-racist liberalism and its contradictions; and challenges to
anti-racist liberalism that emerged in the 1960s.
Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction provides an overview of the main arguments of the book and
the theoretical perspectives informing the analysis. It discusses how the
book differs from previous scholarship by focusing on the historical
relationship between anthropology, U.S. liberalism, and the creation of
liberal anti-racism, as developed in the first half of the twentieth
century and challenged in the late 1960s. A discussion of the
contradictions of liberal anti-racism, and how to think about them, is at
the heart of this chapter.
1The Anti-Racist Liberal Americanism of Boasian Anthropology
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 develops an account of the Boasian intervention on race within
the context of racial stratification in the U.S. and the development of
anthropology as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century. The
Boasians were part of larger intellectual networks striving to reinvent
understandings of America and U.S. culture along liberal and socialist
principles in the post-World War I era, a moment of intense American
nativism directed against both peoples of color and southern and eastern
European immigrants. The chapter discusses the principal Boasian
contributions to anti-racist thought, focusing on how they critiqued
scientific racism, reconceptualized racial classification, and promoted the
culture concept. It also compares Boasian approaches to race and culture
with that of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, who sought to carve out a
space for the recognition of a distinctive African American culture and
identity in ways that departed from the Boasian orientation toward
assimilation.
2Franz Boas, Miscegenation, and the White Problem
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 analyzes an under-examined paradox in the thought of Franz Boas,
one of the most important anti-racist intellectuals of the twentieth
century. Why did Boas contend that the ultimate solution to the "Negro
problem" involved sexual relations between white men and African American
women? The chapter develops a close reading of his discussions of race
relations in the U.S. and argues that Boas' thought was driven by a deeply
pessimistic assessment of the possibility of the liberalization of American
whites. This assessment provided the potential grounds for a critical
analysis of American liberalism and white supremacy. Boas, however,
ultimately embraced a vision of American belonging that tacitly confirmed
the whiteness of America. The chapter concludes with a comparison of Boas'
reflections on miscegenation to those of Harlem Renaissance intellectual
George Schuyler to explore the contradictions in Boas' thought on the
political economy of interracial sex and marriage.
3Ruth Benedict, "American" Culture, and the Color Line
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 examines Ruth Benedict's writings on race and racism. Benedict
was a student and colleague of Boas and one of the most famous
anthropologists of the twentieth century. The chapter provides a close
reading of Race: Science and Politics (1940) and related essays and popular
works. It details how Benedict built on the Boasian intervention by
providing a cultural history of racism and suggesting solutions consistent
with New Deal economic and social reforms. It then shows how she drew on
the model of European immigrant assimilation to assess the condition of
non-whites, ultimately representing racism in the U.S. as an aberration
from American culture, a problem in the nation rather than of the nation.
She instructed (white) Americans how to reconcile the existence of racism
in America with a faith in America as a liberal racial democracy, erasing
the constitutive power of whiteness in the U.S. body politic.
4Post-World War II Anthropology and the Social Life of Race and Racism
chapter abstract
This chapter provides an account of anthropological engagements with race
and racism in the post-World War II era. It identifies key developments in
U.S. anthropology in the context of formal decolonization abroad, domestic
civil rights mobilization, and the ascendance of the U.S. as the preeminent
global power. It also examines the institutional expansion and
transformation of the discipline as it confronted challenges to racial
exclusion in the civil rights era, paying particular attention to the
situation of Black anthropologists within a white-dominant academy.
Finally, the chapter discusses anthropological engagements with race as a
social phenomenon and challenges the standard scholarly view that cultural
anthropologists abandoned the analysis of race and racism.
5Charles Wagley, Marvin Harris, and the Comparative Study of Race
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 examines the work of anthropologists Charles Wagley and Marvin
Harris, who developed comparative analysis of racial classification in the
Americas in the 1950s and early 1960s. This work was initiated through a
project on race relations in Brazil sponsored by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This project
sought to understand the "harmonious" race relations perceived as
characteristic of Brazil. However, Wagley and Harris provided ethnographic
evidence of racial prejudice in Brazil. They developed comparative accounts
of racial classification systems and "social race" that had the potential
for generating a structural, materialist account of white-dominant racisms
across the Americas. This potential, however, went unrealized. Harris and
Wagley relied on an understanding of racism that equated racial
discrimination with "caste" segregation, a model that led them to downplay
racism in Latin America and the power of whiteness in the U.S.
6Black Studies and the Reinvention of Anthropology
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 explores the heretofore unexamined relationship between the
turbulent politics of the 1960s, a sense of crisis in anthropology, efforts
to decolonize anthropology, and critiques of racial liberalism. The chapter
begins with an account of the crisis and self-critical turn in
anthropology, focusing on Black Studies critiques of the academy and U.S.
liberalism and their effects on the discipline. It proceeds to analyze the
writings of three neglected figures, African American anthropologists
William Willis and Diane Lewis and white anthropologist Charles Valentine.
Read together, these scholars challenged anthropology's self-image as a
progressive, anti-racist discipline, promoting expansive understandings of
racism as a structural phenomenon that anticipated later critiques of the
culture concept as a successor to biological racism. They also demanded a
reckoning with American liberalism-and the anthropology that nurtured it-as
a paradoxical project of racial inclusion that left the normalization of
whiteness intact.
Conclusion: Anti-Racism, Liberalism, and Anthropology in the Age of Trump
chapter abstract
The conclusion reflects on the lessons of the book for the present. In an
era marked by the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, there is an
enormous temptation to defend liberal anti-racism as the unfulfilled
promise of America; to link the promotion of the values of racial freedom,
equality, and justice to national identity, heritage, and culture; to
reclaim the nation from a resurgence of overt white supremacist
nationalism. The conclusion draws on the book's account of anthropological
anti-racism and its critics to identify some of the problems associated
with that orientation and reflects on why the election of Trump came as a
shock to many liberals. It then provides an account of the enduring
whiteness of anthropology and the enduring need to decolonize the
discipline and the nation.