A new paradigm in the American Anthropological Association: Neo-Racial Anthropology

Abstract

Is the most critical issue facing anthropology departments their whiteness? In an address to the American Anthropological Association, then-president Akhil Gupta announced a “racial reckoning” and “decolonizing project.” Whiteness, white space, or white-norming is how liberal antiracist anthropology continues to harbor racism, Gupta and other critical theorists hold. They further argue that the racial and political identity of anthropologists—either as voices of marginalized groups or allies of such groups—should determine the future of our field. This is a new paradigm, I argue, and my term for it is Neo-Racial Anthropology. Neo-racialism grows out of increasing skepticism about the value of crossing sociocultural divides to do ethnographic research. Ethnographic research also has been undermined by the presumed moral authority of the oppressed. Once neo-racialists add the assumption that white hegemony is the key underlying issue in most situations, an anthropologist’s racial identity becomes a key determinant of what they judge to be the best new research. This is the logic that turns neo-racialists into racial reductionists. If other anthropologists acquiesce to this kind of thinking, an ethnography-based interpretive social science could ossify into an academic priesthood.