I don't know if it's right to call myself an anthropologist, at least not at this point, but I am a student of the discipline of anthropology. I am a student of the discipline that studies the human species, that has dedicated itself to understanding our past and our present so that we may better-understand the future, the discipline that has been guilty of upholding the same ideas that it now seeks to dismantle—ideas of racism, sexism, androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and any number of other things.
The anthropological discipline is not perfect. It has a long and convoluted history with plenty of issues, and there are still a multitude of disagreements amongst the people within it. There are anthropologists—a significant number of them—who disagree with the ideas that I will outline here, because anthropology is a many-faceted area of study and is filled with people who have a variety of belief systems (and I'm not just talking about religious ones).
A pretty typical area of contention is that of the "lumpers" versus the "splitters." This debate mainly occurs in the study of fossil hominids, and the terms "lumper" and "splitter" are fairly literal names for the beliefs of the people to whom they apply. Lumpers believe that fossils which display a new (or variant) characteristic are not necessarily indicators of a new species—instead, they are variants upon species that may have already been discovered. Splitters believe that every new characteristic defines a new species, rather than being a display of traits that fall within a relevant range for a particular group.
Views on the concept of race can be fairly easily extracted from these ideas—lumpers tend to believe that race is a biologically flawed concept, and that the concept of race is instead a social construct. Splitters tend to believe that there is biological evidence for concepts of race.
The history of anthropology as a discipline favors the latter idea. Early anthropologists sought to explain the superiority of white European lineage, and they used human variation as a way to do it. They measured skull dimensions and created a cephalic index. They looked at height and skin color and facial features, and they supported the concept of a "Great chain of being," with white males sitting at the top, just beneath God and his angels. Under this belief system, indigenous groups were not human. Native Americans and Aboriginal people were animals to be hunted for sport as much as for scientific study. All great technological developments were attributed to the ancestors of the white male population of this planet.
Things have changed since then. Cultural anthropology is now reliant upon the principles of critical cultural relativism and historical particularism (cultural relativism being the idea that all behaviors are equally valid and cannot be judged outside of the context in which they occur, and historical particularism being the idea that each group has its own history of development which cannot be judged against the history of any other group). There has been a development of "feminist anthropology," in which (female) anthropologists have called for the rejection of the notion that all important cultural developments came from men, and tried to teach people not to apply traditional gender roles to the past (just because someone was buried with a sword doesn't mean that they were a man).
Something that has come along with these changes is the rejection of race as a biological concept. As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, most splitters support race as biology. The lumpers, however, have done what they can to destroy the idea that race is a biological phenomenon, and many of those efforts have culminated in a class that I'm taking right now: Human Variation, subtitle "Race, not racism."
Our class is dedicated to debunking the biological idea of race while simultaneously addressing racism as a cultural act. We spend approximately two hours every Wednesday morning discussing various ideas surrounding the concept of race, and the racist ideas that arise as a result. Most of our discussions can be boiled down to this: Racism exists. Race does not. Ethnicity exists. Race does not.
Biologically (based upon what we've discussed in class), race does not make sense. Biologically, there is not a single trait or genetic marker (that we've found) which differentiates one "race" from another. All traits occur within all groups at varying frequencies. There is more variation as a percentage amongst a single population than there is amongst the human species as a whole.
The problem with race is that groups have different definitions of it. Races are recognized differently depending on where you are. The American concept of various "races" is not applicable in other areas, and there is a very simple explanation for that—race is a cultural construct, not a biological one.
So why does the concept of race exist if there isn't a biological reason for it? Simple. Human beings love the concept of "us" versus "them."
You see it everywhere, not just on a racial level. We love to divide ourselves up—American vs. Canadian (or British, or French, or whatever country you want to pick as long as it's "other"), Christian vs. Muslim, North vs. South, East vs. West, male vs. female (and yes, gender and sex are two different things, but that's a discussion for another time).
How do we protect ourselves? We come up with a list of ways to recognize "us," and then we come up with a way to recognize the other—"them." Loyalty to a tribe is normal—it's a way of maintaining your social group, of recognizing who is safe and who isn't—and we see it across the animal kingdom. It's also problematic.
When you're a wild dog that's part of a group and a different group crosses into your territory, you're going to defend it, because that interaction can be life or death. It can be the difference between having food and going without, between your young surviving or dying, between your survival or someone else's.
Humanity, on the other hand, will survive even if we all look a little bit different. We'll survive even if we all believe slightly different things (provided we don't start killing each other over those beliefs—I'm looking at you, vast majority of human history). We don't need to discriminate against each other this, and yet we do it anyway. Why?
There are a lot of societies that have implemented structural discrimination. There are a lot of societies that have implemented structural discrimination based on gender, skin color, religion, country of origin—you name it, someone's probably been discriminated against because of it. Unfortunately, the United States is one of those societies which has been built on this discrimination—discrimination which has been largely against people of color. Yes, there is a history of discrimination against immigrants of all backgrounds (the Irish, and the Eastern Europeans, and whoever else), but on a structural level, the vast majority of discrimination has taken place against people with non-European backgrounds.
If you are white, you benefit from this discrimination. You benefit from this system. I benefit from it. Whiteness brings with it a level of privilege that other people do not have, and if you're a white, straight, Christian male, then you're even better off than everyone else. You may not believe yourself to be racist, but you take part in a racist system every. single. day. The things you say, the things you do, the things that you believe, are all a part of this system, and unless you recognize that and actively work against it, you are part of the problem.
To every white person out there who is whining about how hurt they are over the fact that people are calling them racist, or homophobic, or xenophobic, or whatever else after the events of the last couple of weeks: what are you doing about it? What are you doing to dismantle a system that favors you over everyone else? What are you doing to recognize your own privilege and use it for the benefit of those who don't have it? What are you doing?
Are you calling out the people in your group who support racism and homophobia and whatever else? Are you trying to dismantle a system of white supremacy? Are you holding your compatriots to the same level of moral decency as you hold your opposition, or are you giving them a free pass because they agree with you on certain things? Are you letting your emotions over being called out get in the way of you doing something to solve the underlying problem?
(And yes, these are all questions that I'm asking myself. I am not exempt from this.)
I can guarantee you that your hurt feelings are nowhere near as bad as the feelings of all of those people who have just witnessed a country tell them that they don't matter (and yes, I know that Secretary Clinton won the popular vote, but the point still stands). Your hurt feelings are nowhere near as bad as the feelings of all of those people who are fearing for their safety, for their livelihood, for the simple recognition of their humanity. Your whiteness is keeping you in a safe little bubble where you get to ignore all of those things, and that is what privilege looks like. Privilege is getting to ignore the very real concerns of other people because the things that they're worried about have no effect on you.
Own your privilege. Own your contributions to a system which gives you benefits and protections that other people have been fighting to achieve for centuries. Own your actions and your words and acknowledge that you're a part of the problem, because that is the only way that any of this is going to get better. The only way that any of this is going to get better is if we actively work to push back against the system which has given us all of this privilege.
The only way that any of this is going to get better is if we own the concept of tribalism, if we take it so far as to make the "us" people who stand for basic human decency and the "them" people who refuse to let go of the privilege that harms so many others, if we recognize all of the things that make us the same rather than the few things that make us different, if we stop making false equivalencies about problematic behavior. Throwing a brick through a window during a protest is not the same thing as stripping rights from people who are different from you, and silence about those things speaks just as much, if not more, than actually saying something does.
I am not perfect. I benefit from this system too. I do things that are part of the problem. I am trying to be better. I am trying to unlearn all of those things that society has taught me. I am trying to believe in humanity above all else, to call out problematic behavior where I see it (and that includes the group in which I reside), to recognize my privilege and use it to make things better, not worse. I have been fortunate enough to have friends who call me out and educate me in the process. I strive to be as patient as they are, even when they have every right to not be. I am trying to learn from them so that I can educate others when they cannot or will not, because it is just as much my responsibility as theirs to try to make this world a better place (if not more so, as my privilege affords me a platform that many of them do not have).
Racism is a cultural construct, and the only way to get rid of it is to change the culture. I will ask you again: what are you doing to help?
(And no, volunteering a couple of times a week does not automatically exempt you from this. Just because you do good work every now and then does not mean that you are not benefiting from a system which privileges you above other people. Your warm fuzzies do not make you not racist or non-problematic. You get to step out of that world and back into your own. Many people do not.)
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