In November 2020, anthropologists and professors Dr. Jemima Pierre and Dr. Aisha Beliso-de Jesús virtually joined the Tufts community to critically discuss the anthropology of white supremacy. The talk covered global racializations, white supremacy, and the dominant attention to culture and ethnicity rather than race within and outside the discipline of anthropology. Starting with a land acknowledgement and speaker introductions, the discussion flowed from how their 2016 American Anthropological Association (AAA) panel on white supremacy became wrapped up in Donald Trump’s election rather than the interconnected structures of white supremacy; the pushback Drs. Pierre and Beliso de-Jesús experienced in producing a Special Section for the American Anthropologist related to that panel; the racial vernacular of development, especially when describing the African continent; and the notion of the Jungle Academy as a police project of the state that dehumanizes racialized bodies. The rich discussion ended with a Q&A that touched on anthropology as a tool for transformation, the imperative for anthropology to have a clear decolonial bent, and how critical it is for anthropologists and students to think about the pervasive global structures of anti-Blackness within the discipline and global capitalism and development more broadly.
As an undergraduate student and audience member, what struck me the most and what I continue to take with me is the speakers’ clear definition of what white supremacy is and is not: white supremacy should not be iconicized as individual white supremacists, but rather understood as the mundane which is structurally embedded in the world (Beliso-de Jesús and Pierre 2020, 72). In other words, white supremacy does not refer to an identity category in which racist actors are placed. Instead, white supremacy should be understood as a modality through which social and political realities are lived; a modality that is always in relation to and cannot be disconnected from racism, capitalism, racial capitalism, and racial patriarchy, all of which are intimately tied to colonial rule.
Understanding white supremacy as a modality thus allows for critiques to distinguish between the temporary yet dominant media spotlights on white nationalists and the embeddedness of white supremacy within structural racism. To borrow Patrick Wolfe’s phrasing of settler colonialism invasion as a structure, not an event (Wolfe 2006, 388), Dr. Pierre and Dr. Beliso-de Jesús’ reflections on a 2016 panel they organized underscores the importance of understanding white supremacy as a modality; the event of Donald Trump winning the election drew attention away from the structures of white hegemony, policing, and racialization within anthropology that the long-planned panel was meant to highlight.
Likewise, Dr. Pierre also explained how white supremacy not only underlies the colonial foundations of anthropology as a discipline, but also underlies what theory is and is not. Across different contexts, these foundations act as a scaffolding for mundane acts of violence in addition to more explicit, white nationalist expressions. For instance, Dr. Pierre spoke to how the fetishization of ethnography as a small-scale, experienced-based analysis leaves little room for critiquing white supremacy within larger structures of power. When anthropologists, specifically anthropologists of color, attempt to move beyond these limitations, however, their work is commonly disavowed and rendered outside the scope of anthropology.
Similarly, Dr. Beliso-de Jesús’ ethnographic descriptions of how police training essentially molds sameness in the body politics of police academy trainees by erasing trainees’ cultural backgrounds emphasized how acknowledging or understanding embodiments of white supremacy can propel us to move away from questions of white supremacists as an identity and toward questions of the replication and reproduction of white supremacy.
Near the end of the talk, Dr. Beliso-de Jesús shared that the ways that white privilege is produced, enacted, and enabled looks different everywhere; different places and dynamics produce different forms of racism and inferiority. In understanding that white supremacy is localized regionally, it is also important to ask how white supremacy is localized within anthropology. Yarimar Bonilla’s call to unsettle, rather than decolonize, anthropology is relevant here. Because there is no precolonial status to which the discipline can return (Bonilla 2017, 335), Bonilla explains that “what is unsettled is not necessarily removed, toppled, or returned to a previous order but is fundamentally brought into question… Rather, it necessitates refashioning our intellectual commitments and collective purpose” (335).
Given its theory, methodology, and the racialized boundary that continues to be drawn between theory and method, anthropology cannot be divorced from white supremacy. To disrupt anthropology then, whether it be anthropology’s theoretical cornerstones or methodologies, is to pay attention to white supremacy within anthropology as a modality. It is to examine power structures that are within and parallel to the discipline with an ethnographic gaze, a critical gaze, and a gaze that brings white supremacy into question.
Works Cited
Beliso-de Jesús, Aisha M. and Jemima Pierre. 2020. “Special Section: The Anthropology of White Supremacy.” American Anthropologist 122: 65-75. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13351.
Bonilla, Yarimar. 2017. “Unsettling Sovereignty.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 3: 330–339. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.02.
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387-409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.