Category: 11/18 Pierre & Beliso-De Jesús

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.

As discussed in their paper, “Anthropology of White Supremacy”, Aisha Beliso-De Jesús and Jemima Pierre opened their talk with an analysis and reflection on their experience hosting a panel by the same title at the 2016 American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference. This panel, which highlighted the work of anthropologists of color and addressed “white supremacy as a long-standing global system of power that benefits all white people” and as an embedded system within the discipline of anthropology, was surprisingly well-attended for a topic normally relegated to the fringes of such conferences. The largely white and politically liberal audience of anthropologists in attendance were looking for answers to the recent election of Donald Trump in 2016 and were subsequently unsatisfied as the panelists “addressed white supremacy as a long-standing global system of power that benefits all white people” directly implicating the discipline itself as a part of these systems (Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2016, 69). Their talk at Tufts held 4 years later, on the heels of another presidential election, was also highly attended, as professors from many departments, students, and others from the greater Tufts community logged on via zoom to hear these two scholars. Although the outcome of this election was different than the last, the audience on this occasion was decidedly more interested in asking the speakers about their work in relation to their own fields, in interacting with their methodologies and theories, and in relation to the movements for social and racial justice that once again have erupted across this country. This gradual paradigmatic shift can be seen in many ways on Tufts’ campus, whether it be through this speaker series, curriculum audits across the university, various forms of student activism, or the creation of new departments and fields of study. Although this shift in expectations and understandings for this event and in relation to other matters, it must be understood not primarily as a reckoning with the past four years of Trumpism but through the decades long work of BIPOC communities, activists, and academics, like Jemima Pierre and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús to usher in serious reflection, radical change, and reckoning within academic disciplines, institutions, and society at large.

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.