The speaker event, Anthropology of White Supremacy: A Critical Discussion, was held through an online forum due to the global pandemic circumstances and attended by over 150 students and faculty members at Tufts University. Dr. Jemima Pierre and Dr. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, anthropologists from UCLA and Princeton University respectively, introduced the discussion by describing the research they’ve done together as well as the experiences they have had as women of color in the field of anthropology. Dr. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús began by recalling a particular panel they had both spoken in, and described the overwhelming audience attendance at the panel, a large sum compared to that of previous years, as a general response to the recent election of Donald Trump. Many of the “concerned anthropologists,” as she put it, filled the audience of the panel on “White Supremacy” because they viewed the election of Trump as a resurgence of American white supremacy, ignoring the decades-present power dynamics of white hegemony already existing in the country. Addressing the field of anthropology as a whole, Dr, Beliso-De Jesús referred to a general “push back” from anthropologists on the issue of white supremacy, followed with a collective dismissal of the need for the subject to be acknowledged and tackled through dialogue and research. Dr. Beliso-De Jesús blamed some of this on the development of what ethnography has become: a small-scale, experience-based analysis which hinders anthropologists from addressing large-scale arguments regarding systems. The small-scale analyses in regard to white supremacist powers involve individuals and individual aggressions, while larger-scale analyses address the system, and the powers is creates as a whole.  This idea of individual-level research and experiences compared to large systems is important to consider when discussing powers of white supremacy, and is a topic which we have covered in depth during class discussions by asking questions such as, what does it mean to look at the individual versus the group? How does this address power, and who represents or is being represented? Dr. Beliso-De Jesús described white supremacy as more than explicitly a system, or individual aggression, but rather a “modality through which social and political categories are lived.” This is a particularly interesting lens through which to view this salient system of perpetuating white hegemony as it conveys the ways it suppresses people and those in which it categorizes and separates people from one another. As we’ve discussed in class, Dr. Beliso-De Jesús attributed these systems of power, including racial patriarchy and gender dynamics, to white colonization. Dr. Pierre described the aggressions commonly viewed as parallel to white supremacy and white colonization through building blocks which create a “foundation for scaffolding for mundane acts of violence.” Dr. Pierre broke these down into what is within us, throughout the world, and in the field of anthropology. She began by describing the “within us” category as perpetuations of white power induced by the contents of our textbooks and curriculums in school and by what is “preached in the pulpits.” The foundations “throughout the world” involve the white European international power system developed through colonization and residing globally as a white-capitalist-dominated economy. The last foundation, involving the field of anthropology, brings us back to discussions we have had in class about racism within the field in terms of hiring policies as well as in terms of research and ethnographic methods.

Dr. Pierre brought this third foundation of “mundane acts of violence” in the field of anthropology into the discussion by addressing who is doing the research and who is providing the knowledge of these other cultures which become the roots of cultural indexes used by populations to further white hegemony. She described this phenomenon as the “social conditions of whiteness embedded in evidence and discovery.” In conjunction with the contexts for categorization as promoted through anthropology, Dr. Pierre attributed linguistic practices to the “unifying or reducing of African language.” This  brings us back to our class reading of Hall’s “The West and the Rest” (1996) where Hall analyzes the power dynamics in discourse as “those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true – i.e. to enforce its validity, its scientific status” (Hall, 205). In Dr. Pierre’s evaluation of the discourses produced through anthropological and linguistic ethnography, it becomes clear that these fields hold the power to validate or challenge the systemic subordination and categorization of populations which is so central to white supremacy.

After their introduction of white supremacy in different contexts, Dr. Aisha Beliso De-Jesús and Dr. Pierre each described the work they have done individually on the subject. Dr. Beliso-De Jesús began this section of the event by describing her work on white supremacy within the police force through the formation of officers during recruitment training. While racial power appears in the “molding” of recruitment mentality from one’s own culture to being “open minded” of others’ backgrounds and values, Dr. Beliso-De Jesús described the way recruitment officers in the police force conform to a system of racializing the bodies of officers and anticipated criminals. This involves the officers’ perceptions of “dangerous criminals” as six-foot basketball players, an index of racial stereotypes associated with African American men. Adjacently, Dr. Beliso-De Jesús described the ideals for the officers in charge of pursuing said perpetrators as “that of a decathlete” or a “white aggressive military man.” She described this system as one that “[admires] white fascist bodies” and addressed the relationships it possesses between these presentations of white fascism in the body and the demographics shared between police and fascist groups and how these overlaps between the two systems have led to intersections between the KKK and police systems. Dr. Beliso-De Jesús’ work has demonstrated the foundations of white supremacy and the power dynamics in police systems which we have spent many class discussions evaluating.

In Dr. Pierre’s summary of her work, she returned to her earlier argument regarding perpetuations of white supremacy through linguistic and ethnographic studies. Dr. Pierre addressed the anthropological development of what defines an African environment in terms of its whiteness or lack thereof. This aspect of racialized anthropology overtly combines location and race in a manner which we have seen in John Hartigan’s analysis of Detroit (2010) as well as in Mariana Mora’s discussion on the Ayotzinapa and the drug environment and incarceration systems in La Montaña, Mexico (2017). In her discussion of anthropology in African countries, Dr. Pierre introduced the salient discrepancy between connotations of corruption and inadequacy in African governments through the lens of lexicons by which these governments are assigned terms such as “failed, zombie, and parasitic.” Dr. Pierre criticized this assignment of terms by addressing the corruption in American government which is not unique from that in the countries so criticized for their own imperfect government systems. This returned her discussion to her criticism that on a local, and individual level, we experience American corruption and political instability as simply perpetuations of the historical capitalist nature of our “great” country which appears in American textbooks.

The three foundations of white supremacy introduced by Dr. Jemima Pierre at the beginning of the event – individual, global, and in anthropology – gave the audience of the event three lenses through which to observe the formation and movement of the powers of white supremacy as a system of violence and perpetuation of white hegemony. The “molding” of police recruits during training as described by Dr. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús demonstrate the systemic ways in which white supremacist powers and government authority are still intertwined. The two speakers asserted that, despite the audience’s widely-held belief that Donald Trump’s election would be a resurgence of white supremacy, the hegemonic powers of white supremacy have, and still do, control the political and social climate of not only the United States, but the world, through the repercussions of colonization, discourse, and at the most basic level, education.

Works Cited

Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” Pp. 185–227 in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson. Wiley-Blackwell.

Hartigan, John. 2010. Race in the 21st Century: Ethnographic Approaches.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mora, Mariana. 2017. Ayotzinapa and the Criminalization of Racialized Poverty in La Montaña, Guerrero, Mexico. PoLAR, 40: 67-85.