Anthropology News: surprise, it’s bleak!
At the annual meeting of the [American Anthropological Association] in November 2010, the Association Operations Committee (AOC) and the Executive Board (EB) received the Final Report of the Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology(PDF). Formed as an ad hoc commission in 2007, the 13-member CRRA co-chaired by Janis Hutchinson and Thomas C. Patterson was charged with examining diversity and academic climate in the discipline as well as efforts within the profession to address enduring racial inequalities.
via AAA Commission on Race and Racism
The quote I pulled is long (and damning) but worth the read, if only to show you just how much the field of anthropology has failed its participants and how far we still have to go:
[…] the CRRA conducted two focus groups at the 2008 annual meeting and surveyed members of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Association of Latina/o Anthropologists, and the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists for their experiences and examples of “best practices”. Participants repeatedly and in different ways expressed their experiences as graduate students. These include but are not limited to:
(1) many departments give lip service to diversity, devalue the kinds of research questions that minority students want to pursue, and allow discrimination to go unchallenged; (2) at a more subtle level, they believe that many faculty assume that minority students are less capable than other students, silence them in courses, do not give them honest feedback on their work, are either uncomfortable in their presence or interact with them as patrons; (3) they occasionally feel put on the spot by faculty who require them to share personal experiences (have you every been arrested?) or to serve as the representative of a group in discussions about race and racism; (4) they feel overt resentment or hostility from faculty and peers who feel threatened by their standpoints and critiques; (5) they frequently feel that they must self-censor in discussions of racism or immigration, for example, in order to avoid retribution if their views do not conform to faculty thinking on the subject; (6) they perceive that everyday life in the departments are infused with subtle forms of racism that make them feel isolated, invisible, excluded, vulnerable, unworthy, unwanted, or treated as research subjects, which leads some to seek mentors elsewhere (in different programs or even different universities) and others to drop out; and (7) they feel pressure to prove that they deserve any funding they have received, especially in a time when there is not sufficient support for graduate training. Both graduate students and faculty pointed out that (8) many faculties and graduate student bodies are not diverse. Some faculty members said (9) that they were in other departments (e.g., African-American Studies, Latin American Studies, or Women’s Studies), because their work was not respected in anthropology, because of their research was viewed as falling outside the scope of the discipline; (10) they felt marginalized, used as a consequence of practices like cross-listed courses, or even locked out of the field. There was a feeling that (11) some departments want visual differences in their faculty and graduate students but not differences of opinion that emerge from the everyday experiences of minority anthropologists.
While overt racism is less acceptable than it was 35 years ago, the subtle forms of structural racism prevail and keep the numbers of minority students low.
Welp.
(Source: blog.aaanet.org)
