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.
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