Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy

Abstract

This article considers how anthropology can grapple with white supremacy by conceptualizing it as global and in relation to religion. Drawing on the exchange published as A Rap on Race between anthropologist Margaret Mead and the writer James Baldwin, I address the connection of religion and moral belief to racism, white supremacy, and the critique of racial liberalism. In their conversation, Mead and Baldwin discuss Christianity and white supremacy revealing a complex conjuring of Islam and Muslims that I describe as racecraft. The racialization of religion and the theological components of white supremacy have a particular relevance to the construction of anti‐Muslim racism. To describe how ethnography and anthropological theory can intervene, I offer an example of the study of white supremacy and discuss the implications. [racism, religion, white supremacy, Margaret Mead, James Baldwin]

In Mourning: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2020

“…A number of works in 2020 similarly echo the importance of not only focusing on racism but on naming whiteness beyond its iteration in white nationalist extremism and analyzing "how white supremacy is structured in and through our institutions, our disciplinary theories and methods, our everyday relations, and global economic and political processes"(Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2020, 67). We observe this in the re-centering of whiteness in diversity campaigns (Shankar 2020), the reproduction of whiteness in the ostensibly neutral science of nutrition (Valdez 2020), how whiteness structures the lexicon of development and its practices in the Global South (Pierre 2020b), the moral anxieties and strivings of white women in the face of racialized police killings (Kwon 2020), white sexual politics (S. Bjork-James 2020), whiteness as the invisible apparatus undergirding the imperial history of scientific interpretations of faces (Mak 2020), and the cosmology of white supremacy and its relationship to anthropology (Rana 2020). The category of "white" comes to the fore as a moral-ethic made from and through this presumption of innocent subjecthood, a status that is coded as just, sustainable, benevolent, scientific, and ultimately sacrosanct and made material through the law, the family, religion, resource management, epigenetics, and anthropology.…”

Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology

“…The coloniality of the film was rendered present in ways that were palpable, felt. As Gill (2021) explains in his recent critique of Forest of Bliss : “Gardner's refusal to offer context personifies the ‘theological problem of white supremacy’” (Rana 2020, 101) within anthropology, which renders non‐Christian religious practices, and by extension its practitioners, as racial objects to be salvaged and gawked at but not be contextualized and understood.” What we suggest in this article is that it is not enough to say this to our students, to offer critique, but to direct their senses to what (some) already feel as uncomfortable, awkward, and unsettling in the film through active intervention.…”

Decolonizing Visual Anthropology: Locating Transnational Diasporic Queers‐of‐Color Voices in Ethnographic Cinema

“…Authored for Western audiences, Gardner's film aligns with the exhibitionist style of filmmaking first popularized by Robert Flaherty, the explorer‐cum‐filmmaker from the 1920s often credited with having invented the genre of documentary film. Gardner's refusal to offer context for these important rituals and religious practices personifies the “theological problem of white supremacy” within anthropology, which renders non‐Christian religious practices, and by extension its practitioners, as “racial objects” to be salvaged and gawked at but not be contextualized and understood (Rana 2020, 101).…”

“…By revisiting films from Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón‐Muntaner, and Richard Fung, I call for a much‐needed expansion of existing boundaries of ethnographic film and visual anthropology. Building on recent critiques of heteronormative patriarchal whiteness of anthropology (Basu 2008; Behar 1993; Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre 2020; Merryman 2020; Rana 2020), I ask: What does inclusion look like for ethnographers of color, for immigrants, for queers‐of‐color, for people like me?…”

“…Unfortunately, like many other queers‐of‐color scholars, I feel pretty powerless when confronted with disciplinary hegemonies and regimes of power that work to sustain existing racial and gender hierarchies (Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre 2020). As Junaid Rana (2020, 99–101) recently pointed out, the history of anthropology is steeped in global white supremacy, Enlightenment values, and Christian theology. Visual anthropology is not immune to this affliction.…”