CA Forum on Anthropology in Public: Representations of Race and Racism in American Anthropology

Abstract

After a panel on racism at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Williamsburg, Va., in July 1998, a South African colleague remarked to me that American anthropologists had not yet assumed the lead in elucidating techniques for combating racism—an initiative awaited by the international community of professional anthropologists. That remark was part of the impetus for this paper. American anthropology, currently one of the country’s least-integrated or “whitest” professions (Cross 1998, Huber 1998), has apparently failed to come to a consensus on what race means in American society and on how to deal with racism. Among the consequences of this failure are that American anthropologists deliver inchoate messages about anthropological understandings of race and racism, especially in introductory textbooks, and that they do not participate actively in public discussions of race and racism. I will present some evidence of this from a study of the renderings of race and racism in contemporary American sociocultural anthropology textbooks and discuss the images of anthropology or anthropologists that appear in the public discourse on these topics in the United States. I will go on to discuss some new approaches to teaching race and racism that I believe we should consider if we are to communicate, first, to our