Caribbeanist casualties: Interrogating the application of structural vulnerability to forensic anthropology

Abstract

Biocultural approaches are instrumental to the evolution of forensic anthropology, and this practice must first reckon with its own violences before it can ethically address structural violence at large. We take up the issue of coerced migrations of Caribbean populations and forensic practice at the southern border of the United States, to problematize how forensic identification standards contribute to the casualties of ethnic erasures and potentially exacerbate structural vulnerability of Black Caribbean populations. We put forward that forensic anthropology is complicit in maintaining inequality in death and identification for Black Caribbean migrants through the absence of necessary reference data and methods of population-affinity estimation, and the adoption of fundamentally flawed linguistic constructions of Blackness. Pushing forensic anthropology to continue engaging with the colonial logics that have shaped its understanding and motivation for quantifying human biologies is key in efforts toward a progressive disciplinary future.