In October 2015, Sallie Han and I put out our third co-edited issue of Open Anthropology, “Race, Racism, and Protesting Anthropology.” The articles in that issue were again made free to read from July-August 2020 as part of the American Anthropological Association’s Confronting Anti-BIPOC Racism initiative.
For current comprehensive coverage of race and racism in anthropology, see the Race and Racism in Anthropology page from Intro-to-Anthropology, which covers biological origins, colonial categories, structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Editorial Context: Anthropology’s Modest Contribution
Our original purpose for the “Race, Racism, and Protesting Anthropology” issue was to make free-to-read some of the anthropological articles discussed in Leith Mullings’s 2013 American Anthropological Association presidential address, which was published in American Anthropologist as Anthropology Matters. Update 2021: We are saddened by loss of Leith Mullings (1945-2020).
Tracing these sources meant revisiting Leith Mullings’s 2005 Annual Review of Anthropology article Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology. As Mullings repeatedly noted, “although anthropologists have written extensively about race, anthropological contributions to the study of racism have been surprisingly modest” (2005, 669).
That “surprisingly modest” contribution was evident when we had to select articles within the mandate of Open Anthropology: to draw on the AAA/Wiley-Blackwell archives in order to open articles for a limited free-to-read time period. The limited availability of articles focused specifically on racism (as opposed to race) illustrated Mullings’s point about anthropology’s gaps.
The Discipline’s Historical Paradox
I think the first paragraph of the Editors’ Note still rings true:
Race has been central to the emergence and development of anthropology in the United States. Anthropologists have used a critique of racialized biological determinism–by either emphasizing cultural explanations or attempting to deconstruct the very notion of a biological basis for racial classifications–as a means to confront the structured racism of American society. In its focus on muting race and racialized explanations, U.S. anthropology has historically paid less attention to racism. Racism was viewed as primarily an illusion about race, overlooking that structured racism itself gives importance to race. While anthropology has therefore often been used to protest structured racism, its institutional position as an anti-race science has often also insulated it from a necessary self-critique of the discipline’s own silences, exclusions, and practices around race.
And for a follow-up to that dynamic, see Starbucks Enlightenment.
From Protest to Hope
The final article in the issue, Heath Pearson’s “The Prickly Skin of White Supremacy: Race in the ‘Real America’” takes us to the idea of hope: “John Jackson’s claim [is] that hope is one of anthropology’s most insightful and powerful rubrics ‘for reimagining possibility.’ Not blind hope. Hope as that which binds together ‘social change, progress, and even revolution'” (56; see On Ethnographic Sincerity).
The idea of hope led to our final co-edited volume, the July 2020 Open Anthropology.
The Discipline’s Ongoing Challenge
This 2015 editorial work highlighted a persistent paradox: anthropology has been central to challenging scientific racism and racial determinism, yet it has been surprisingly modest in studying racism itself. The discipline’s focus on dismantling the biological validity of race sometimes obscured attention to how structural racism operates through institutions and power systems.
By 2020, when the AAA made these articles free-to-read again in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, the urgency of this work had become undeniable. Yet as Mullings noted in 2005 and as we observed in 2015, anthropology still had significant work to do in moving from protesting racism to systematically analyzing and addressing it.
Related Resources
Current comprehensive coverage: Race and Racism in Anthropology – Complete overview from biological origins and colonial categories to structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Contemporary course perspectives:
- Race as Social Construction (2024) – Why racism produces race, not the reverse
- Whiteness as Unmarked Category (2024) – White privilege, intersectionality, and institutional racism mechanisms
Historical perspectives:
- Anthropological Fieldwork Challenges Scientific Racism (2024) – How early anthropologists like Boas, Mead, and Hurston used fieldwork to challenge racial determinism
- Biological Anthropology and Racism (2011) – The entangled history of evolution studies and racial categories
Broader context: Power Analysis – Understanding how power systems create and maintain structural inequality
To cite: Antrosio, Jason. 2015. “Race, Racism, and Protesting Anthropology.” Living Anthropologically website, https://www.livinganthropologically.com/race-racism-protesting/. Originally posted 17 September 2015. Revised 9 January 2025.
Note: This post originally appeared on the Anthropology Report website and was later transferred to Living Anthropologically. The original version included an extensive bibliography of AAA articles on race and racism available through 2015, which has been removed as many links are now outdated.