Anthropology has been very good at teaching that race is socially constructed — and, Leith Mullings argues, not nearly good enough at confronting the structural racism that persists no matter how many people accept the social-construction point. This lecture for The History of Anthropological Thought 2024 takes up the case for an antiracist anthropology: one that moves past the slogan to name racism as an embedded system, reappropriates the culture concept through political economy and power, and confronts the racism inside the discipline itself. It reads Mullings alongside Lynn Bolles on Black feminist anthropology and Ghassan Hage on how to engage theory generously, and runs the argument straight into the present — the gap between 2020’s organizing and 2024’s campus crackdowns. It follows On Agency and Social Struggle; for fuller coverage of the field, see the Power Analysis hub.
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Key Concepts from This Lecture
- Knowing that race is socially constructed does not, by itself, dismantle racism — Mullings argues antiracist anthropology has to move past that recognition to confront structural racism directly (402).
- Mullings defines racism relationally, as practices and structures that convert perceived, supposedly fixed difference into inequality — not merely individual prejudice (401).
- The culture concept, anthropology’s old antidote to deterministic race, too often ends up doing the work of race — so it has to be rebuilt through political economy and power, in the lineage of Eric Wolf.
- An antiracist anthropology would also have to confront the racism inside the discipline and commit to serious public engagement.
- Individual antiracist trainings (DEI seminars) accomplish little without structural change — though the lecturer refuses to let that critique be co-opted by those calling DEI itself racist.
- Bolles calls Black feminist anthropology a theoretical dream for the discipline, yet most Black feminist scholars remain unacknowledged in canon-setting texts (394, 395).
- Mullings frames neoliberal racism as a global project that is nonetheless unstable and uneven, opening space for transnational antiracist organizing (399) — visible in 2020’s globally linked BLM, Indigenous, and refugee movements.
- The politics of refusal (Simpson, Rosas, Bonilla) — rejecting the settler state rather than seeking recognition within it — helps explain why even liberal institutions met 2024’s protests with militarized force.
- Hage argues theory should be read generously and critically, asking what a reading helps you understand, rather than classifying scholars by label — Bourdieu’s “classified by their classification.”
Moving Beyond “Race Is a Social Construct”
The core of Leith Mullings’ “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology” is a challenge aimed partly at anthropology itself. The discipline has trained generations of students to say, correctly, that race is socially constructed — but it has treated that recognition as if it were the finish line. For Mullings it is barely the starting line. Confronting racism, she writes, requires moving beyond noting that race is socially constructed to confront forthrightly the extent to which structural racism is pervasively embedded in our social system
(402). Saying race is a construct was supposed to solve racism; it didn’t.
Her definition of racism does the heavy lifting. It is, she writes, a relational concept. It is a set of practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that transforms certain forms of perceived differences, generally regarded as indelible and unchangeable, into inequality
(401). Defined that way, racism lives in institutions, policies, and routine practice, not just in private prejudice — which is why individual-level interventions, the familiar DEI trainings, do so little on their own. The lecture is pointed here: such trainings without structural change can accomplish little, but that critique is very different from the bad-faith version, pushed by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people now, that DEI is itself a form of racism.
Reappropriating Culture Through Political Economy
For anthropology to actually contribute, Mullings says, it would need to do several hard things — and the first is to radically reappropriate its own central concept. Culture was anthropology’s great move against biological determinism: it made learned behavior, not fixed race, the explanation for human difference. But culture has a way of hardening into a substitute for race, doing the work of race — sorting people into bounded, essentialized groups by another name. Mullings’ remedy is that any appropriate concept of culture must confront political economy and incorporate relations of power. This is the intellectual lineage of Eric Wolf, the generation Mullings came up in: culture cannot be a way of evading power, it has to be built to hold it. Beyond that, antiracist anthropology would have to confront the racism within anthropology and engage the public seriously.
Black Feminist Anthropology and the Discipline’s Failure
Lynn Bolles supplies the sharp irony at the center of the lecture. Black feminist scholars, she argues, constructed approaches to race, class, and gender that brought it all home—linking anthropologists in a more integral way to the communities in which they worked and inviting the communities to speak back to anthropology
(395). It offers precisely what the field says it wants; in her phrase, Black feminism, then, is an anthropologist’s theoretical dream come true
(395). And yet, despite these contributions, most have yet to be acknowledged in the most recent canon-setting texts of the discipline, and few are recognized by the field
(394). The failure is not abstract: anthropology lost Mullings herself in 2020, and the lecture is candid that the discipline is not bringing its best to the work of centering these voices.
From 2020 Organizing to 2024 Crackdowns
Mullings’ observation that neoliberal racism, like neoliberalism, appears to be a hegemonic global project but is unstable and uneven
— and that within those spaces contestatory projects emerge
(399) — sets up the lecture’s hardest contemporary question. As she puts it, globalization also creates new possibilities for transnational antiracist organizing
(399). In 2020 that organizing was visibly global: BLM protests outside the United States, links to Palestinian and Indigenous movements, refugee-justice work, what Simpson called a global Indigenous movement. By 2024, supposedly liberal colleges and Democratic-led cities were calling militarized police against student protesters — the kind of response one might expect from Texas or Florida, arriving instead in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.
The lecture’s explanation runs through the politics of refusal. Drawing on Audra Simpson — and on Gilberto Rosas’s Barrio Libre and Yarimar Bonilla’s work on Caribbean sovereignty — it distinguishes movements that seek recognition within the state from those that refuse the settler-state apparatus altogether: refusing to vote, to pay taxes, to be a citizen of it. When protest aims at conservative policy, institutions tolerate it; when protest threatens the legitimacy of the state itself, even liberal institutions respond with force. That, the lecture suggests, is part of why the crackdowns crossed the usual political lines.
Reading Theory Generously: Ghassan Hage
The final reading shifts from racism to method. Ghassan Hage warns against treating theory as fashion, fetish, religious cult, or football team — the habit, in Bourdieu’s terms, of letting people be classified by their classification
, so that “Marxist” or “feminist” becomes the whole of who a scholar is allowed to be. His alternative is a question: does this reading help me understand something I’m doing? Read generously and critically both, because writing is hard, and be kind to one another in the process. Hage’s own situation underscores that the stakes are not merely academic: in 2024 he was dismissed from the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology over public statements on Israeli policy toward Palestinians. He has continued to thank students for, in his words, pumping political life into my old disillusioned self
.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is antiracist anthropology?
It is Leith Mullings’ call for a discipline that moves beyond stating that race is socially constructed to actively confront structural racism. In practice it means rebuilding the culture concept through political economy and power, confronting racism within anthropology itself, and engaging the public — rather than treating the social-construction insight as sufficient.
Why isn’t “race is a social construct” enough?
Because structural racism persists regardless of whether people accept that race is constructed. Mullings defines racism as a set of embedded practices and structures that transform perceived difference into inequality (401), which means it operates through institutions and policy, not just individual belief — so naming the construction without confronting the structure changes little.
How can the culture concept end up “doing the work of race”?
Culture was meant to replace deterministic race with learned behavior, but it can quietly reproduce the same move — sorting people into bounded, essentialized groups under a different name. Mullings argues that a culture concept built to confront political economy and power, in the tradition of Eric Wolf, is the way to keep culture from substituting for race.
What is the politics of refusal?
It describes movements that refuse the settler state rather than seeking recognition within it — declining to vote, pay taxes, or claim citizenship in it (Simpson, Rosas, Bonilla). The lecture uses it to explain why even liberal institutions met 2024’s campus protests with force: protest that threatens the legitimacy of the state draws a harsher response than protest aimed at particular policies.
Why does the lecture say Black feminist anthropology is underrecognized?
Because, as Bolles argues, it offers exactly what anthropology claims to value — integral ties to communities and a discipline willing to be answered back to (395) — yet most Black feminist scholars remain absent from canon-setting texts (394). The loss of Mullings in 2020 made the gap between the field’s stated values and its practice especially stark.
Readings
- Lynn Bolles, “Seeking the Ancestors: Forging a Black Feminist Tradition in Anthropology” (2001)
- Leith Mullings, “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology” (2005)
- Ghassan Hage, “Towards an Ethics of the Theoretical Encounter” (2016)
For comprehensive coverage of race and racism in anthropology, see Race and Racism in Anthropology.
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