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.
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