- [Voiceover] Hi everyone,
welcome to our round table,
the police after Ferguson,
extra judicial violence,
race, and the role of
anthropology.
I'm Shalini Shankar, I teach
at Northwestern University,
and it was a privilege to
organize this round table
as a part of the Committee
on Minority Issues
and Anthropology, the CMIA.
Two former CMIA members, Laurence Cohen
and Mianthe Fernando
were also instrumental
in developing the panel
abstract with me, and I'm
grateful for their collaboration.
The impetus for this panel
needs little explanation
in today's fraught landscape
of racialized policing,
violence, activism and protest.
It spans the killings of
young African American men,
the response to the lack of
justice served in response,
the ongoing dehumanization
of individuals at the hands
of armed security in high
schools, colleges, and on city
and suburban streets,
and the virulent racism
that has led to the protests
on college campuses across
the country.
Amid these events and the
relentless media cycle
that covers them, what can
and must anthropology offer?
How does our discipline,
comforted by its platitudes
of familiar and strange,
attend to these highly
problematic issues?
Beyond critically
interrogating key moments
such as the activism
fostered by Eric Garner's,
"I can't breathe."
Or the embodied stances of,
"Hands up don't shoot."
By celebrities and athletes alike,
anthropology is very
well positioned to apply
its expertise and knowledge
on policing, social justice,
and criminology to lay the
foundation for substantive
long-term change.
The discipline furthers
understandings and linkages of
events of the United States
to international locations
of settler colonialism and violence.
For instance, comparative approaches
to the state and policing
to which Palestinians
are subject.
Anthropology can also attend
to the modalities across which
such messages travel,
including social media,
especially Black Twitter
and the widely followed
activists including
DeRay, Netta and others,
who connect daily with
on the ground efforts
distributing vital information
on black lives matter
and other movements.
Much can be learned and
emulated in our efforts
by how these activists track and circulate
the rising anti-black
lives matter sentiments,
and how they systematically
critique attempts
at co-option and de-legitimization
such as all lives matter.
So in light of these and other events,
as you may know, the
triple A recently created
a task force on police brutality
and extra judicial violence.
This task force, in effect
I believe since April,
has a charge that is
thoughtful and far reaching,
but one that clearly can
not be accomplished alone.
As part of our work on this
task force, we're building
a database of experts of
topics of racialized policing.
If anyone in the audience
considers themselves
an expert on this topic,
and you're willing to,
or if you're willing to put
us in touch with colleagues
who are, please consider
putting your name, email,
and address, your name email address and
areas of specialization
on this sheet that I will
pass around.
So, it's not just a general
sign in sheet for attending,
but if you actually have
expertise and are willing
to speak to media or
via resources we develop
kits to distribute to
educators on how to handle
these issues, we'd really
appreciate your information.
So, our panelists today
explore anthropological forms
and methods of analysis
that are needed and
possible for furthering racial justice.
The esteemed presenters
draw on anthropological
teaching and writing, and
scholarly life more generally.
To reconsider the discipline's
role in driving change
and ideology and every day practice
surrounding these issues.
As you'll see the scholars here are
as much astute commentators on the complex
events and processes that in gender,
racialized violence and
collective response,
as they are thought leaders on how to move
forward from this point on
in ways that bridge academia
and the public's fear.
I'll now turn it over to our presenters,
Lee Baker who is joining us via Skype,
he's at Duke University.
At the end of the table, at the far end
of the table is Raymond Codrington,
who is at CUNY among other places,
Leith Mullings, who is at CUNY as well.
John Jackson who's at the
University of Pennsylvania,
Yarimar Bonilla, who is at Rutgers,
and Jonathan Rosa, who is at Stanford.
So, the format is as follows:
They'll each speak from
anywhere from five to 10 minutes
and followed by a discussion
between the panelists,
in which I may introduce
a few themes that emerge
for general discussion,
and then we'll open it up
to the audience, because
this is the real benefit
of a session like this, is
to hear what other viewpoints
people bring to these
questions, and the kinds of
things they think we
should be discussing as
anthropologists, so there
is a mic in the middle
of the room for that
portion of the program.
Thank you.
Um, how do I get Lee to
be on the big screen?
I'm addressing this question to no one.
- [Voiceover] There he is.
- [Shalini] Oh, he's there, hi thank you.
(laughs)
This is, I want the rest of my
life to be this simple, okay.
- And I took up, thank
you so much Shalini,
I can't see you, but um...
I can hear myself, I think--
- [Shalini] Yeah, the
sound is odd, one second.
Is there a way to do
something with sounds?
- Testing.
(mumbling)
Testing.
Well, I'll get started, see how it goes,
if it's too annoying, 'cause
I don't know where the
volume is on this computer.
No, we're at the conference
center thing, so...
Okay.
All right thank you.
August 9th, 2014, walking down the street,
Parkinson, Missouri, 18
year old Michael Brown
encountered police officer Daren Wilson.
Minutes later, Officer Wilson shot
the unarmed teen six
times, twice in the head.
Brown's body remained on Canfield Drive
as public display of state violence.
Ferguson was fed up.
As the Department of Justice reported,
as the Department of Justice documented,
the police harassment,
intimidation of a town's
largely black citizenry
was not only routine,
but an institutionalized form of...
(mumbles)
Which accounted for dropping 19%
of the township's operating budget.
As the city of Ferguson's...
(audio cuts in and out)
13 14 stated, quote,
"Due to a more concentrated
focus on traffic enforcement,
"municipal corporate revenues
have risen about 44%,
"or 620,000 versus 10-11.
"Total court revenues
are expected to reach
"2,029,000 in the fiscal year of 13-14."
A revenue stream higher
than property taxes.
Whether or not people
in Ferguson recognize
that they were paying
the fines and court fees
and property taxes, they
certainly felt the toll
as the legal systems take on the town.
People in Ferguson were indeed fed up,
protesting for 100 days.
The media storm that covered the protests
and passive show of violence in Missouri,
led president Obama to send Eric Holder
down to be the former chief.
The world watched as Ferguson protesters
were tear gassed, get taken back
after night.
(audio cuts in and out)
In the summer of 14.
It felt like there was a new awareness
of police violence and incarceration,
systematic exploits...
(audio cuts out)
However, when ...
(audio cuts in and out)
Open letter to the Brown family and Time
magazine, she blatantly shifted
and extended...
(audio cuts out)
For many Americans.
She wrote...
(audio cuts out)
"Relatives who have lost loved ones
"to senseless gun violence."
Her letter...
(audio cuts out)
Most of the children in Saint Michael...
Lower shootings, and by extension,
bring school shootings
and senseless violence
at the hands of guns.
In late November 2014, Ferguson...
(audio cuts out)
Once again, and your a...
(audio cuts in and out)
Days later, an early...
(audio cuts out)
Report a video Jake took Eric Garner
outside of the Staten Island store.
This resulted...
(audio cuts out)
Police accountability, cameras...
(audio cuts out)
In April 2014, Baltimore
erupted in violence
and protests after...
Died at high school, a violent death...
(audio cuts)
With the help of an aggressive prosecutor,
police arrested...
Yes?
Oh.
I don't know, is it...
No I think this is conference call.
Well, this isn't...
Is that any better?
Just stay there.
Is that a little bit better?
Okay.
So where was I?
(laughs)
I apologize for that.
So, the similar grand
jury declined to indict
the officer Daniel Patillo
after he was recorded
on video choking Eric
Garner outside of the
Staten Island store, this
resulted in more protests,
calling for accountability,
body cameras, and better
community policing.
In April 2015, Baltimore
erupted in violence
and protests after Freddie Gray died
an agonizing and violent death
while in police custody.
With the help of an aggressive prosecutor,
the police were arrested,
protests, marches,
and reactions were
organized around the country
and the Black Lives Matter movement
helped to focus national conversation
on police violence.
In 2015, Dylann Roof in a
racist, hate-filled rage,
strategically stalked
parishioners in a prayer meeting
at the Emmanuel African Methodist Church
in South Carolina.
He was shot and killed...
He shot and killed nine people.
Last month, Chris Mercer killed 13 people
and wounded 20, when he violently attacked
a small community college
in Roseburg, Oregon,
and just last week, ISIS
terrorists attacked Paris
in a coordinated effort, with bombs, guns,
and suicide bombers, throughout the city.
As anthropologists, we are
called to make connections,
to understand how power
and violence connect,
and motivate people towards either peace
or violence, or sometimes both.
We have the power, and the obligation,
to explain and narrate
culture, and narrate culture.
And it seems that the
global culture we inhabit
is a culture of violence.
From Syria to Ferguson,
from Cairo to Charleston,
violence, pain, hate, frustration,
inequality, and rancid racism,
seem to be common themes.
In the media saturated society,
where body cameras, smart phones, Go Pros,
and satellite trucks seem
to report everything,
and experts on Twitter, CNN, and even the
American Anthropological Association
seek to explain the violence in our world,
the connection between war, terrorism,
and police and gun violence,
are sorely missing.
However, the frustration,
precarity, and both
hope and hopelessness can be mapped
onto specific factors that can
include the loss of support
by the state, volatility, complexity,
uncertainty, and violence
and threats of violence.
Marginalization, and systemic injustice.
It is not easy, but is incumbent upon us
to explain clearly and
fitly to our students
and various audiences, the impact facts,
marginalization, and injustice have
on people, society, and culture.
At the same time however, we have to
be mindful of some of the positive strides
taken to get a safer more just society.
We have to keep it balanced,
and I think it is important
with all the violence
we've seen to recognize that, actually,
gun violence is down by
about half since 1993.
Things like drunk driving deaths are down,
fewer people are killed
in wars just because
there's many wars, but
not as many people are
getting killed, hunger
in the world is down
and there's a lot of other
sort of positive things,
but it's just difficult
when we're saturated
with all the violence that
we feel like we should
have an obligation to explain.
So I just wanna, that
was the sort of the point
I was trying to make, there's
a lot of violence in the
world, and we have an obligation to help
contextualize it and explain
it, thank you so much.
- Good afternoon everyone, good afternoon.
(clears throat) I'd like to thank Shalini
for organizing this panel.
Sent out an email telling
us how much time we had,
I saw 10 minutes you
said five to 10 minutes,
so I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna go 10.
All right, I'm gonna go
10, I've actually organized
my 10 minutes into three
different sections.
One is talking about Ferguson,
the context of Ferguson,
one is talking about the
movement and the moment
that Ferguson represents,
and I'll finish with
what anthropology can do.
So in terms of context, Eric
Holder referred to Ferguson
as ground zero for civil
rights for this generation.
We saw protests, we saw freedom riots,
we saw networking that came out of the
activities related to Ferguson,
and the further development of the
Black Lives Matter
movement, and organization.
And at the same time we saw responses
by the state to the quelling of the set
and very militarized responses, so,
what happened in Ferguson
was very specific, um...
And unique at the same time,
but it also has a lot of
the same elements that are
reflected across the country,
so Ferguson, in my mind, sort of brought
the attention of structural race...
The structural nature of
race and racism to the floor.
So it's actually an interesting test case
for the sort of lived
and material experiences
of structural racism or systematic
disadvantages tied to race.
So in the Department of
Justice's Ferguson report,
they noted arrests and
police harassment leading to
disproportionate contact of blacks
with the criminal justice
system, leading to a loss of
income, jobs, and at times death
in the case of Mike Brown.
And we see the structural aspects of
Ferguson as we see that
20% of Ferguson's budget
came from fines and court appearances.
Basically on the backs
of its black residents,
so essentially these residents were caught
in the system by not
being able to pay fines
being accepted to arrests,
police harassment,
and as I said earlier, this represented
a decrease or a more lack
of access to income jobs
in the times of death.
So it's essentially,
what happened is a double
or a triple tax on blackness.
But at Ferguson we see policy,
practice and race coming
together to create
new produced this advantage,
as well as these militarized responses
by the state to quell descent.
So, in the post Ferguson moment,
we see that the Black
Lives Matter movement
has facilitated a moment, and the moment
has facilitated a movement.
This has created a broader
context to address race
and racism, changing
notions of blackness along
with responses to racism, as
well as policy interventions.
So the foregrounding of
queer, trans, and gay people
and women of social
movements feels quite new
and quite unique to
this particular moment.
Excuse me.
The critique of normative
versions of blackness
and leadership, the
critique of respectability
politics, and alliances
around system change
are all in the ether in this
moment and at this time.
So, in terms of alliances
around system change we see
mass incarceration and
the coming together of
unlikely parties such
as the Koch brothers,
Ann Jones, we see reform,
criminal justice reform,
for an example of this
is President Obama's
claimancy of 40 plus prisoners,
well this isn't enough we must lift our
boats kind of policy intervention is
emblematic of his administration.
The critique or the moment of critique
or the context of
critique is even stronger
in this particular moment, so this sort of
pushed back against color blind policies
is a sort of result of I think
the atmosphere and the context that
Ferguson's created, and of course we have
campus activism most recently
at the University of Missouri.
But what also see more deliberate
focus on race and racism across sectors.
So we see across sector embrace
that many of the attendants
of Black Lives Matter.
So we see human rights groups that...
Such as Amnesty International attending to
grassroots activism, the same with
the legal field through the Center For
Constitutional Justice,
providing infrastructure
and legal support.
And we see the two main political parties
and the presidential nominees or would-be
nominees embracing or not embracing on
different points, the notion
of Black Lives Matter,
so the place of politics
and political discourse
is much more apparent at this point.
Interestingly we also see
philanthropy and foundations engagement
with sort of grassroots activism
and some notions that afforded
by Black Lives Matters.
And it's interesting because,
a lot of the money and
interest has been stared to
as racial justice and
more deliberate race,
but the funding now is
not as much based on
metrics or defined
outcomes, it is much more
fluid and open which
is a switch or a change
for philanthropy and the
role that philanthropy plays
is problematic in a lot
of ways for a lot of the
participants, so that's
a broader question we can
talk about later if you'd like.
So, the question is,
what can anthropology do?
And I preface all this by saying,
when asked and when appropriate,
we can do a lot.
When I think, obviously, our skills are in
ethnographic documentation of the movement
and the moment are extremely valuable,
to bear witness to what is happening
is an extremely valuable pursuit,
we have the tools, and we know how to do.
And regardless of what
happens in terms of outcomes,
through this movement or from this time,
what's transpiring requires documentation.
Having said that, we don't
have to record everything.
These are issues around ethics,
privacy, and surveillance
so we have to be very deliberate
and focused in regards to how we use our
methodology and our tools.
But given anthropology's
knowledge around social movements,
race and identity formation,
organizational structure,
we can offer advice, and
sometimes technical assistance
if asked.
We can also help facilitate
cross-generational
alliances, and elders
can offer insights into
the successes and the
challenges of past
movements, but a lot of times
elders don't want to be
called elders so we should
also think about language.
(laughing)
So having said...
Having said that, um,
anthropology has any number of
methodological as well
as analytical tools.
We have the ability to build networks
both nationally and internationally,
and the ability to transfer
our skills to a broad set
of audiences through public
and applied anthropology.
So on that note, I'd like to, um,
I say challenge anthropology
and anthropologists
to engage in a movement, but to do so
in a responsible way.
With all of this ethical
and moral awareness
that we can muster up as we move forward
in this very important
moment, so thank you.
(applause)
- Good evening everyone, no, afternoon.
Although it would be
evening on my time cycle,
but good afternoon everyone.
Uh, first I'd like to thank
Shalini for putting this
together, and for her work as the
Head of the Committee on Minority Affairs,
Issues, okay.
And she's really done
a lot of work to try to
make that committee actually work and so
I'd like to thank her for that.
So, what I'll do is I will
briefly sketch some topics
that I think we can
discuss, then contextualize
some of what we are confronting now.
So I'm going to talk first about
the concept of new racial projects.
And then I'm going to talk a bit about
social movements, and then from there,
the role of anthropology.
So, I think we could all agree
that the events in
Ferguson and other sites
of state sponsored
violence, and the aftermath
represent a visible culmination of
new racial projects that are
in fact hemispheric, if not worldwide.
So I'm trying to get a
theoretical handle on this.
I find that Omi and Winant's
concept of racial project
is useful to sync with.
So they define racial
project as one as quote,
"Simultaneously an
interpretation representation
"or explanation of racial dynamics,
"and an effort to reorganize
and redistribute resources
"along particular racial lines."
So I think what's interesting about this
is that we can identify racial projects
that are created to distribute
resources more equitably,
as well as those that
are designed to produce
and reproduce inequality.
In the US in the 60s
and 70s and in the 90s
in South Africa and in
Central and Latin American
countries, racial projects
to redistribute resources
more equitably, the Civil Rights Movement,
the Anti-Apartheid
struggle, and the movements
that brought about
Constitutional recognition
in Central and Latin America
resulted in significant potential
for progress.
The response was the emergence of a new
racial project, characterized by new forms
of racism, and new
interpretations of inequality.
In Central and Latin American countries,
the ideology of
multiculturalism often serves to
disguise the appropriation
of land and resources.
In the US, abolition was met
with Jim Crowe segregation,
and currently, the next
racial project, is massive
incarceration and state
sponsored violence.
And this has become the
core of a new racial
project to turn back
previously obtained rights,
and to reinforce this
possession of resources
and of life itself.
In the US and South Africa,
the hegemonic explanations of these
new racial dynamics revolve around
the ideology of post-racialism.
That racism no longer exists,
so failure to thrive is a consequence
of individual or group culture.
However, racial projects are always
contested, and there has been a resurgence
of new social movements
and popular protest.
In the US the carceral
state and the impunity
of state sponsored violence
has been the site of
a new movement, in
addition to long-standing
organizations, for example
the Black Lives Matter
movement that has drawn tens of thousands
of young people into activism.
We see all over the
country that the student
movements are gaining traction.
This actually feels like my generation
70s, where you have student movements,
and all kinds of things happening.
So there's a new wave of global activism,
the Occupy movement in
the US actually spread to
several countries, and popular protests
and huge demonstrations
in both Latin America
and Europe have resulted
in the election of
governments oriented towards
defying the new world order
with respect to death and
distribution of resources,
although obviously they
confront serious challenges.
Though the movements differ significantly,
these movements have some
common features that I think
are worthy of note.
First, they have international
ties and or are international in scope.
So I think we've all heard about
the Black Lives movement,
communication with the Palestinian youth
about how to deal with
tear gas, et cetera,
the Afro-Colombians for
example have relations with
African Americans, so there's
a great deal of
international communication
and support.
Many of these movements
rely on the human rights
framework and the use of
international covenants.
And this has advantages and disadvantages.
On one hand, it's possible
to bring this to bear,
and Michael Brown's parents
I think testified before
one of the UN bodies and that body
issued a scathing report about
police brutality, the death penalty,
incarceration in the US.
But, always these have to...
These covenants must be
enforced locally.
Digital technology is an integral element
and I think we'll hear more about that.
And it's been of tremendous
assistance in the
globalization of protest.
But however, it can also
be used by other forces
to constrain protest.
Another issue about,
with respect to digital technology,
is whether it becomes the movement itself
or whether it functions
as a tool of the movement.
And this is something
that is being worked out
in various places.
Most of the new movements we see,
in most of them we see
an emphasis on culture
and the use of culture for mobilization
and for general support.
In many movements, there's
an active discussion
about patriarchal forms of organization.
Women leaders are at the forefront
and gender and sexuality
are being renegotiated.
And I don't have any downside to that one.
(laughing)
So despite the rising
inequality and racism,
there are important spaces and fissures
that we should take note of.
As Pam Buck, who is here, I
always quote her tells us, quote,
"More people than ever are questioning the
"hegemonic ideology."
And uh, a recent poll
of US Americans
found that 60% of Americans now feel
that the police treat blacks differently,
and this is just a few months after
a poll that much of the
majority of the white population
thought there was no more racism.
So, there's a bit of a shift there.
The other thing that's happening,
whiteness no longer has the same value.
If you've been reading the papers,
there's some interesting
articles in there,
the life expectancy of
a cohort of white men
is declining
for the first time ever,
largely due to suicide and drug use
and drug abuse.
We also find that heroin
use has skyrocketed
among whites, leading
to a new conversation
about drug abuse.
So once it's among whites,
we're beginning to get
a new conversation, as a matter
of fact, the headline said
that people are talking about
a gentler war on drugs,
which is interesting,
since the war on drugs has
been a war on people of color.
So, it remains to be seen
where this will lead.
However, these are openings
that we should take note of.
What can we do as anthropologists?
With respect to the
discipline, we now have more
racialized anthropologists
in the discipline,
but I would suggest that in many areas,
and universities, and uh,
other places of work,
the focus on diversity
rather than on anti-racism
has assisted the ideology
of post-racialism.
Anthropologists of color
continue to face discrimination
in many areas, as we know from
recent reports and articles.
Teaching is an important
thing that many of us do.
And in a post-racial era,
teaching about race is
particularly challenging.
And so as we teach, we
must be willing to confront
race and racism, even when it produces
hostility among the students.
And, it certainly does in many cases,
and there's one case of
a young African American
woman, the students went
to the Dean and she was
reprimanded, but I think Facebook helped
straighten that out, but um,
it's difficult but it's
something we have to do.
And I would suggest that a useful tactic
in trying to do this is
historacizing racialization
and white privilege.
I think that helps people to understand
how things come about as a result of
social conditions.
Scholarship, as always
it's necessary to address
the problematic appropriation of culture,
which always happens, to understand race
as a social relationship,
and to identify racism
in all its manifestations.
It's important to develop and support
new areas of research, which we are doing,
such as policing and incarceration.
And as Raymond said, I
think it's clear that the
tools of anthropology
can be well applied to
understanding new racial projects.
And in fact trying to look
ahead, to see what the
next new racial project is.
We can analyze issues such as
what are the social forces,
what is the context,
what can a comparative approach tell us
about racial projects,
and the effectiveness
of social movements?
So I think it's critical also to intervene
in the hegemonic ideology
but we also have to
find ways to get our work
into the public sphere,
we should stop talking to each other,
well we can continue
to talk to each other,
but we should also try
to talk to other people.
And finally, for engaged anthropologists,
this moment also represents
a tremendous opportunity
to link our research to social movements,
and to collaborate with activists
in seeking social justice, thank you.
(applause)
- So I'll be brief,
and hopefully mostly coherent.
So, what I'd like to do is
maybe overly provocatively,
reframe, at least for
me, the question at the
center of this panel,
at least, the question
as I see it.
And the question for me
really ultimately is,
do black lives matter to anthropology?
And I admit to you there
are moments when I'm
able to answer that question and think
in the positive.
And other moments when I feel like
I can't make a strong case.
There are a couple ways in
which I try to parse that
so I'll be very quick,
we'll see if it makes sense,
the first is what I
consider to be these ongoing
conversations about the
very role of politics
or the political within
the field of anthropology.
So there is this sense and
some of it's generational,
though I don't think it's only that,
but there was this moment before
this was so hyper-politicized,
we can just study the cooler route
for the sake of knowing.
Right, this idea that there's a way to
step outside of the
political fray and just know
what the other is doing.
Without any political implications,
without any particular
political acts to grind,
and this sense that one of the things,
some versions of the
current anthropological
projects seem to be producing
are students with a much
more political project.
An investment in the
inextricable relationship
between politics and research.
Some would say in a
post-Foucauldian moment.
Or something, but I think
that's a question for the field,
and we don't answer it
all in the same way.
Some of that discrepancy also speaks to
the various ways in which we understand
the significance of black
lives, and black deaths
snuffed out by the state,
so that's one way to think about it.
The other thing is, there's something so
amazingly ambitious about the
anthropological project,
I think that's why
we're all here.
I often tell students that
it's this wonderful combination
of incredible hubris, and
humility at the same time.
And so the hubris of
course is the fact that
we can imagine as anthropologists,
card carrying members of this guild,
that we can speak across the sciences,
the social sciences and the humanities.
We're in every room, right,
all of these folks are interlocking
even physicists don't imagine necessarily
they can have that kind of reach.
There's something very
ambitious about that.
At the very same time,
fundamentally, I think,
what grounds our methodology is this idea
doesn't matter who the person is,
but if you listen closely enough to them,
if you take seriously what their story is,
you will learn something profound
about them, about their world, and about
the human condition.
Most people don't have the time to
quote unquote suffer fools,
as my mom and grandma would've said.
Some days that's what we do.
Partly because we want
to figure out how people
get to where they are,
why they believe what
they believe.
But also because we recognize everyone
is an incredibly powerful ambassador
for their cultural universe.
And so, one of the ways
in which I describe
my project as an anthropologist is say,
"I'm interested in
listening to black people
"theorize themselves, their relationships
"to other folks, and their
relationships to the state."
And to do that in a way
that really takes seriously
the fact that we don't corner the market
on sophisticated theoretical frameworks
for how we understand
the state of the current
situation in the world.
And so, that to me is really important,
another way to think
about why anthropology
should be at the forefront
of these discussions,
'cause we should already be listening.
We should already know before it happens
that it's about to happen, and why.
What the arguments are,
what the claims are
being made about how they related to,
how folks in precarious
situations understand that
precarity and try to
find ways to carve out
protective space when they know
marginalization can always get worse.
Exploitation can always get worse.
The other thing, and Leith
did I think a wonderful job
of framing this for us is,
there's a way which black lives also
in anthropological
context can seem to matter
somewhat less if these are black lives
that are parochialized as simply bound
within a particular nation's state,
especially if it's the US.
Right, because we privilege,
we always have, this notion, this fantasy,
of the field being way
out there somewhere.
So other people do the work
here in the US, and so it's recognized
that one of the things we
can do particularly well
I think is always transnational, as in
globalize, any particular problem,
any social phenomena is always a global
phenomena as much as a local one.
And so how do anthropologists help us
to understand that, and thematize that
for the rest of the world, compelling,
I think that's really key.
The other thing is the role of
the media, and we know there's so much
about the current movement that sort of
is organized around
the power and potential
of social, we're in a social media moment.
And one of the things I
always remind myself is,
we've been trained in
a sense to be complicit
in our own surveillance.
That at every moment, at every turn,
we're constantly putting more and more
of our business in the street,
as they say.
In a flash, in an instant,
half way around the world,
what does that mean?
What kind of specie is that producing?
What kind of expectations about privacy,
and publicness, is that reconfiguring?
And at the same time we know,
even if we have the images, right,
so the differences there
between Michael Brown
and Eric Garner says,
we have a smoking gun
in ways.
We have it caught on camera.
Even in that moment we recognize
what someone like Gurch would've called
the thinness of the visual image, right?
That it doesn't seem
to give us the kind of
evidence you're grounding
we think that you give us
to make claims, adjudicative claims
on the legal state for how they respond
to the death of black bodies.
And so, thinking about the role
the media can and can not play
is gonna be really important right?
Not necessarily demonizing or dismissing
or disavowing it, but
recognizing it can do,
it's in some ways incredibly open platform
and process in that it can be deployed
through various, and sometimes discrepant,
kind of ends, and we need to think about
the ways in which we are complicit
in particular versions of what
the social media landscape
can do to either reduce,
in a constructive way,
or potentially destroy
the possibility of newly imagined forms
of social community, I
think that's really key.
The last point I'll
make is one of the traps
I feel like we've fallen into is,
and I talk about this a
little bit too much too,
is this idea that we know
we have a really good
argument about race being
a social construction,
and we've basically I think
won that in the public sphere.
In some ways I would also say that
black death, high black
mortality rates are also
a social construction.
Question is how is it constructed
in and through sociology?
What are the ways in which we produce
those things?
And they're both equally real,
in that sense, and so part of,
I think, what I want to imagine is,
as a discipline, one of the things
we have to start doing, is fundamentally
revisiting our basic claims
about what we're doing in the academy,
what we're saying about the world,
how we're doing it, and
why we think we matter
as a field.
Because to not get that right
I think it's recognized,
that not only will
we be irrelevant, but
we're not gonna be able to
have a way of talking about all the things
that are gonna be so
important to challenge
to deconstruct to reimagine in
the 21st Century that actually needs
some real, serious, rigorous anthropology,
I would argue, so thanks.
(applause)
- First, thank you Shalini for
inviting me to participate
in this round table
alongside this esteemed group of scholars.
I'll pick up on some of
the themes that they've
introduced, while also trying to identify
some other lines of inquiry.
Thanks also for allowing
me to share my time
with Yarimar Bonilla, with
whom I've been recently
thinking and writing about issues of race,
representation, and social action.
As we survey the contemporary
terrain of US racial
protests in the face of
inequalities across a range
of institutional settings,
including housing,
policing, education, health, employment,
and political representation,
we are presented
with a fraught set of circumstances
that at once highlight some inspiring
possibilities on the one
hand, and the perpetuation
of disparity, even if in
reconfigured forms on the other.
Students of color and their
allies in institutions
of higher education across the nation,
galvanized by the emergence
of the Black Lives Matter
movement, and similar
racial justice efforts,
are boldly confronting
administrative hypocrisy,
and demanding concrete actions
to address long-standing
structural inequalities
that legitimate everyday racism
on their respective campuses.
These students' efforts
are a reflection of the
powerful, cumulative, and in many ways
unanticipated effects of the hybrid forms
of digital and analogue protests
that Yarimar will
discuss in a few minutes.
Protesters have also disrupted various
presidential campaign events,
issuing politics of respectability,
and demanding the candidates develop
comprehensive racial justice platforms.
These candidates have stumbled publicly,
while seeking to signal
their comprehension of
and solidarity with
racial justice efforts.
But what is the relationship between
the discursive legitimacy
crisis that prompts a shift
from all lives matter
to Black Lives Matter
and broader political,
economic, and racial
legitimacy crises that would require
the dismantling and reconstitution of our
criminal justice system,
as well as the other
aforementioned institutions.
We seem to rely on an optical logic
that presumes upon the existence
of a shared viewpoint, from which we can
clearly see the need for
comprehensive change.
But it seems that no matter how many
dash cam, body cam, and cell phone
videos capture images of
racialized police violence,
there is an uncanny capacity within the
mainstream public
imagination, to view these
situations as singular
events, or momentary
aberrations, rather than
as the logical outcome
of a system that was created to maintain
the hegemonic status of whiteness
within a racialized social order.
Perhaps the visibility of
contemporary racial protests
is an attempt to create
a new optical order.
A new way of seeing race,
and structural inequality.
Thus we might build
from Black Lives Matter
to reconsider how the bodily materiality
of racialized populations
comes to be seen.
Among our anthropological colleagues
who are suddenly preoccupied
with questions of
materiality, ontology, and
different statuses of being,
it is curious that race is
almost completely absent
from their discussions.
For those of us who study race
and racialization however,
we have always had to grapple
with the question of what?
More specifically who counts as a being,
and what practices those beings
are endowed with the capacity to enact.
Tomorrow marks one year
since the killing of
12 year old Tamir Rice
by Cleveland police officers.
For these officers, race materialized this
unarmed child's body as
a threat in need of a
lethal response.
Whether it is Rice, or
an African American child
sitting in her desk at school,
leaving a pool party, or walking home
from the store with Skittles and iced tea,
racism rematerializes
bodies, and linked entities,
transforming their ontologies.
Slight children become threatening adults,
cell phones candy and
sidewalks become weapons,
leisurely bodily comportment
becomes terrifying.
Deference becomes disrespect.
In this context, the affirmation
that black lives matter
creates new possibilities
for rematerializing
the body in the context
of long-standing histories
of racist ontologies.
Finally, the framing of this round table,
Ferguson and beyond,
asks us to think about
the broader spatial and
temporal connections
we might draw between
events of racial violence
that take place across differing contexts.
Indeed, what come to be viewed as emergent
there and now forms of racial violence
and injustice from some
scholarly unpopular perspectives
are for many, the way that
things have always been here.
Thus, a call to think
about Ferguson and beyond
might allow us to connect new historical,
political, economic,
and ethno-racial dots.
However, we should be
careful about what we mean
by moving beyond Ferguson.
Much less this effort, like moving beyond
a black white binary becomes a way of
erasing the very inequalities we seek to
understand and address.
As anthropologists, we must continue to
attend to the profoundly local ways
in which inequality and violence
are experienced in
people's every day lives.
Our analyses must not treat communities
like Ferguson as mere placeholders,
metaphors, or exemplars,
but rather as concrete context
with their own histories,
in which people have been
making their every day
lives, grappling with
the inequalities they face,
and creatively enacting the kinds of
alternative realities that we hope to
understand and document,
as anthropologists
interested in contributing
to the creation of a more
just otherwise, thank you.
(applause)
- Um, thanks so much.
I am going to be very brief I hope,
I just want to make really four points
and a conclusion.
And my comments are based
on reflections about the kind of
afterlife of the article
that Jonathan Rosa and I
wrote about hashtag Ferguson,
which was something that the editor of AE
Angelique Haugerud, he approached me
about doing this, and I
think it's important to
recognize that AE did take that initiative
and make a space for
this article, it came out
very quickly after the Ferguson events.
And, the article has been
picked up and circulated,
it has been read by
a fair number of people,
and I've noticed that
interestingly there
have been two different
audiences for the article.
So, some people have
imagined it as an article
about digital activism,
and other folks have
imagined it as an article about race.
And my comments today
are to push us to think
about how it has to be
necessarily about both
simultaneously.
So, my first point is that I think
we need to think about how and why
certain populations are engaging in
digital activism more than others.
That is to argue that the choice to engage
in digital activism is
already a racialized choice.
We know already that a
disproportionate number of
people of color are on
platforms like Twitter,
and I don't think that
we can think of Twitter
as a public sphere
without thinking about it
as a black public sphere.
And the existence of this
kind of black commons
I think is related to
the fact of the whiteness
of other commons.
And the fact that certain populations feel
completely shut out of these other spaces.
So we know that for example
traditional media, op eds, all these
platforms tend to replicate
white and white male voices
disproportionately, so
it is not coincidental
that folks that feel
misrepresented, maligned,
or silenced in these spaces would then
take more readily and more quickly
to these alternative platforms.
So part of what I would
say to those who are
interested in thinking about Twitter as a
new kind of commons is that they have to
pay attention to issues of race and to the
racialized presence of people on Twitter
and on digital media more generally.
And thinking about that
as a kind of community.
My second point is that,
a lot of folks, when here,
especially from folks
of a particular generation, a lot of
despairing comments
about digital activism,
and the idea that hashtag activism or
digital activism is not enough,
that physical presence is necessary,
that it's important to mobilize,
and there is a lot of
minimizing that is done of these kinds of
mobilizations.
I think again it's important
to take into account
who turns to Twitter and
why, and how it might be
folks whose physical
activism, embodied activism,
might be overly criminalized,
and might be subject to increased violence
and repression, and so
to think then about digital activism
not as a lazy space, but
as a kind of safe space
for populations that have few safe spaces,
and who many kinds of physical gatherings
might be constituted as
riots, as violent protests,
for even just raising your voice, right?
So there is a kind of
affect that can be expressed
through Twitter that embodied
and then in person reactions and
engagements might not be possible.
So, I think in thinking about
Twitter, a lot of folks
have actually thought about
the problems of, for example, trolls
on Twitter, and how
Twitter's not a safe space,
but it's important to think about why
for some people dealing
with trolls might be
safer, easier, than engaging in
activism on the streets,
or in a kind of real way.
And I put real very much in quotations.
So, I think we need to
think more carefully
about that.
Oh, my third point is that,
in thinking about Twitter
and digital activism,
there's also this idea that it's a very
ephemeral practice that
doesn't have long-lasting
effects, I wanna push back
on that in two senses.
So, the first one is that I,
and we omit this point
in the article is that
we need to understand how digital activism
like all activism, its impact
has to be thought about
in a cumulative fashion.
So, rather than looking
at just one episode,
one event, one kind of moment in which
people are Tweeting or
galvanizing or even,
this is also true for other
forms of social movement,
I've written about labor strikes and other
kinds of action, it's difficult
to say when a movement
has succeeded or failed,
and so for example
the mobilizations that
happened around Treyvon Martin
for example one could think
that those mobilizations
failed because his killer
was not brought to justice,
but it activated people
in a particular way
and it created a different
kind of consciousness
and it set the terrain
for later mobilizations
that happened under Ferguson,
under Eric Garner, and that will sadly
continue to happen we
can probably predict.
So, I think that in part pushes against
this idea of digital activism and Twitter
as a very ephemeral practice,
but the other aspect that
I wanna think about is
also how Twitter functions
as a kind of archive.
And particularly a counter archive
for populations, once again,
who are misrepresented
or silenced in the media.
So, I've noticed in
just following folks on Twitter
that I feel one can see on Twitter what
Trio described as the double-sided nature
of historicity.
So, social movement actors'
awareness of themselves
as both actors and narrators of history.
And we can see how people take to Twitter,
not just to mobilize and to
use it as a kind of tool,
but also to document their
practices, because they
know that they're not being
documented in other places.
They know that they're
not getting kind of media
attention that is
important in the present,
but is also important for creating
a historical archive that could then
help tell those stories in the future
and count those as
important contributions to
black history and
American history as well.
So, and I think that we
need to think about that
also in relationship to
some arguments that are made
that I think are important to reckon with
about the trauma that may result from
the repetitive viewing of images
the repetitive Tweeting and Retweeing of
violent encounters with
the police, et cetera,
it's true that we need to think carefully
about the psychological
consequences of that,
but at the same time,
we have to think about
how that fits in within
a kind of black radical
tradition of an archival
practice that does
seek to preserve these stories
that might otherwise not be believed,
not be documented, not be taken seriously,
and lack of that kind
of proof might not have
a lasting imprint.
Now, the fourth um...
And so the last point I wanna make
is also about how Twitter
might also, in terms of this double-sided
nature of historicity, might
also be a space in which
certain populations can
become more empowered.
So, I noticed in the video that circulated
of the South Carolina student, where the
police officer came into the classroom and
tossed her across the
room, if you guys notice,
the cameras started rolling
significantly before
he tossed her across the
room, so the students
who documented this,
they didn't turn on their
cameras when violence
happened, they turned on
their cameras because they
expected violence to happen.
And so, I think that
tells us again about this
archival practice, about this documenting
that is happening, but also how
these technologies are empowering people
to do something about it to speak up.
And so, a lot of folks talked about the
pacificity of the other
students in the room,
but I think we also need to think about
the active engagement of those who
did decided to film, and
there were at least two
that decided to film in that moment.
So I think in looking at
digital activism and social media,
we need to think about how certain
populations are engaging in
Twitter in particular ways,
and some of the arguments
that are made about
Twitter being ephemeral, about Twitter
not being a safe commons
because of trolls,
et cetera, about it not having
a kind of lasting impact
need to be rethought in relationship to
the kinds of populations
that are on Twitter.
And so my conclusion is
basically that, in thinking about
digital activism and
Twitter, we can't think,
I mean digital activism
and race, I'm sorry,
we can't think about
these as separate issues,
and in fact we can not
theorize digital activism
without theorizing race.
Thank you.
(applause)
(footsteps)
- I'd like to thank all
of our panelists so much
for both accepting my
invitation to be on this panel
and delivering such
amazing powerful thoughts
on this topic.
Um, if we could put Lee back up on the
monitor, maybe we could either have,
if anyone wants to respond
to anything that has
been said, this would be
a time to just kind of
do that for a few
minutes, and then perhaps
since we have so many people here who are
clearly engaged, we can
open it up for questions
at the mic, but
first can I ask would
anyone like to respond
to anything that's been said?
Or add anything?
- [Raymond] Can we talk to each other?
- Yeah you can talk to each other.
- [Raymond] I'm curious about,
I'm sorry, what's your name again?
- [Yarimar] Yarimar.
- Yarmiar, um, I'm curious about
sort of Twitter and it's popularity
because there's a lot of sort of
discussion around Twitter's dying,
that Twitter's becoming less popular
it's on the decline or demise.
I'm wondering, is that the case
and if so, how do you think that'll impact
activism and will it
move to a new platform,
is there something unique about Twitter
as a platform that can 't be
replicated on other social media
through other social media outlets?
- Yeah, well I think definitely,
Twitter has a lot of,
oh I'm sorry, don't yell at me.
(laughs)
Hello, okay,
yeah so I,
definitely there's a
lot of particularities
about Twitter that distinguish it
even from Facebook for example,
Facebook's use of algorithms
and all this stuff,
and there are certain
things that have made it
more conducive to activist use.
However, what I always tell my students is
to not over-hype these technologies
and not talk about, you know,
when the moment of Tahrir Square,
people are talking about
the Facebook revolution
and so with Ferguson's been about the
Twitter revolution, but I remind them that
every technology is going to be used
by social movements.
So, the transistor
radio was revolutionary,
the photocopying machine
for making flyers,
right so I think it's possible
that Twitter is either
its use is declining,
or its use is changing,
but I'm confident that
political actors will find
other tools if that is so, to engage with,
so to me that doesn't
concern me in that sense,
I do think it's still being used and being
transformed and there's so many
creative uses that people do
for example, a lot of people
talk about the limits of the
characters, but there's,
you know the 144 characters,
but people do Twitter essays,
where they do these kind of
long things with multiple
Tweets, they find creative ways
of Tweeting images that have text in them,
so I think that as long as folks are
politicized and have
creative capacities always,
they will continue to
use the technologies that
are available to them for that, yeah.
- Interesting, that sort of
speaks to Leith's point about
does the, what'd you say?
Does the medium become the movement,
sorry, sort of speaks to
Leith's, you had a question
in your discussion around if the
social media will become the movement.
And you're sort of saying it's not,
it's transformative,
it doesn't necessarily
relate to the medium only but it will
be used in other mediums as well.
- Well I just think that
all social movements have
engaged with forms of media, I mean
and we can connect this
back to Emmett Till
being featured on Jet Magazine,
now that can be directly
thought of in relationship
to the cell phone videos and all of that.
So, to me it's not the
technology that's creating
political possibilities,
but political actors using
the technologies that are
available at the time.
And that's why my point is more that folks
that are interested in
theorizing digital activism
and thinking about
technologies have to take
into account the racialized experiences
of the populations engaging with them.
And this is a point in the article with
Jonathan Rosa, we also talked about how
the use of Twitter is
not a disembodied use,
people are still in
their racialized bodies,
and those experiences are very much part
of their use of the platforms.
And some folks have talked about how,
in terms of the trolls
they might've made light
of that because some
folks have talked about
how if your picture of
your Twitter handle,
if you are black and
especially black women
get trolled way more.
But I think that that has to be understood
in the kind of aggressions
that black women
face off of Twitter as well,
so I don't know if they're
feel more exposed on digital media
than in daily life or
if it's related to their
disproportionate exposure.
- [Raymond] Thanks.
- Comment on anything?
Should we open it up to the floor?
Okay, so I would invite
anyone who would like to
pose any questions to our panelists,
or have any related comments
to please use the mic,
I think it's probably gonna
get turned on, thank you.
Oh, I am, is it on?
I'm sorry, can I ask you to also please
state your name--
- [Voiceover] Sure.
- Before you speak, thank you.
- [Voiceover] Um, so really quickly,
my question was actually
for Dr. Baker, is he--
- State your name please.
- [Voiceover] Okay, my
name is April Harrison,
I have a question for Dr. Baker,
is he online currently?
Okay.
(laughs)
Hello,
hi Dr. Baker, my name's April Harrison,
I'm a Duke alumna and I just read your
open, or the Department
of Cultural Anthropology's
open letter of love to black students.
So I was wondering if you had any ideas
or if any of the other
panelists had any ideas
on how digital spaces
like Twitter could be used
to bridge the divide
between faculty of color
and students of color and addressing these
social injustices on campus.
- I did not, can you repeat the question?
- [Voiceover] Yes, um...
I'll go a little slower sorry.
- [Shalini] Can you hear her at all Lee?
- I can't really hear that well.
- [Voiceover] Is this better?
Okay.
- [Shalini] I can repeat the question
if you do it in parts.
- [Voiceover] Okay, regarding
the open letter of love
to black students, um,
is there a way that...
(voice echoes)
Yikes, is there a way that digital spaces
could bridge the divide
between faculty of color
and students of color at places like Duke?
- [Shalini] So regarding
your open letter that you
published she wants to
know if there are ways
to bridge the divide
between faculty and students
of color, is that right?
- [Voiceover] Yes.
Well, using digital spaces specifically.
- [Shalini] Using digital
spaces specifically.
- Yes, I think there is a
real important role in it's...
With both digital spaces as well as
analog spaces, I think the
key is for people to sort of listen
and understand
relationships, and I
assume she's talking about
administrators and faculty and
students on college campuses?
Yes.
Um, and really understanding
the real relationship and
I think, part of a
racialized moment in history
where free speech, and
ideas of free speech,
are actually pitted against
sort of systematically
ideas of racial, and words
of racial oppression.
And this dichotomy is a
classic American conundrum
where two goods get pitted against
it's kind of like
colorblind there's something
it's sort of like, it's one
of these moments in time
when two very important aspects of America
come and collide where black people
and people of color end up losing,
because they can not demand that
speech that hurts, speech that ridicules,
speech that is racist is somehow
not free speech, and it's
a real difficult conundrum
but for administrators to understand that
not all free speech is free is one thing,
on the other hand students
have to understand that
there are limitations in terms,
particularly in universities
that have to embrace the wide spectrum
of political ideologies.
That said, I think having conversations,
using digital space,
really trying to populate
these anonymous Yik Yak
sort of anonymous messaging sites
with positive just vibes,
and positive words,
I think would go a long way as well.
And I think that's kind
of some of my thoughts
but listening to each other in honest
and robust engagement where
the faculty the
administrators and students
have equal voices in the process.
- [Voiceover] Thank you.
- [Voiceover] Hi everybody,
my name's Hillary Digg,
so thank you first to all the panelists,
that was really wonderful and stimulating
set of comments, very inspirational,
I really guess I have
a question but I also
had a reflection,
I just really appreciated
the many connections
that were drawn to both
violence and oppression
and marginalization in other contexts
beyond the United States and how
there are not only parallels but also
processes that people are experiencing
in similar ways, although
sometimes to different
effects, I think there are powerful
political economic and global connections
that are driving those,
and that got me thinking
to another, especially thinking
about the relationships
between social movements, and
similarities between the
US and Latin America,
another piece of that of course is,
and not just in that
region but the massive
movements of human beings across the globe
right now, refugees, migrants,
and the ways that they confront incredible
violence in their,
oh I'm gonna get emotional,
in their efforts to
find safety, and a better life,
and there are also the
processes of mass incarceration
and the privatization of the
incarceration system here in the
United States have a
parallel story in terms of
immigration detention
centers and so forth,
so and we couldn't see now also obviously
how refugees coming out of northern Africa
and Syria are being
treated and responded to
in devastating ways, so
I just wanted to add that
as one of the other sort of stories and
processes that's happening,
and I was thinking also
in terms of thinking
about the Black Lives movement
here in the United States,
I was thinking about the Dreamers movment,
right so the undocumented children who are
trying to fight for a
pathway to citizenship
here in the United States,
I just I don't know, have there been links
between those groups at all?
Maybe the panelists don't know either,
but I was curious to know
if there are connections
between the Black Lives movement and the
Dreamers movement, thank you.
- [Raymond] Um, I just wanted to say
a couple of things
about migration and then
maybe we can talk about
Dreamers and Black Lives Matter,
and interconnections between them.
One of the things that's
been most fascinating
about looking at the
migration situation in Europe
is the profound inability
to articulate that
situation in relation to race,
because of the ways in which particular
European nations imagine themselves to not
be grappling with race issues.
Race is a US issue, that's not something
that Europe deals with,
regardless of whether
it created it, right?
So, it's interesting, even
in the context of the recent
terrorist acts in France,
or the recent violence
in France, that again,
that's framed as an issue
around migration, even
though the people who
perpetrated those acts were largely
born in France, so it's
not framed as a domestic
issue of racialization, it's
framed as a matter of migration
and so we need to manage
these migrant bodies in very
particular ways, rather
than managing the policies,
the domestic policies, that
marginalize, racialize,
and position people in ways that in fact
contribute to the forms
of violence that then
these nations wonder
about how they came to be.
In terms of the relationship between
Black Lives Matter and um,
and the Dreamers, it's really tricky and I
don't know how fair this is,
one of the most inspiring things about
Black Lives Matter, to me,
has been again the rejection of a
respectability politics,
particularly because of
the queer women of color who have been
at the forefront of that movement
for whom respectability has never worked,
and I worry deeply about
the Dreamer movement
and the respectability
that it invokes, right,
so the Dreamer movement is,
"We're not the ones who did the bad thing,
"our parents did, we're
aspiring to embrace
"the American dream that
has never really existed."
And so I worry about the ways that the
Dreamer movement reproduces
the very forms of
inequality that it purports to overcome
or attempt to overcome.
- [Voiceover] Hey, thanks,
my name is John Benjamin,
I'm a community organizer by trade,
I remember when I was,
I have a question but I
wanna preface it first,
when I was being trained
as an organizer in my
first experience with racialized violence
as an organizer was
out in Jena, Louisiana.
And really the thing that I learned there
was that the goal of an organizer
is to come in, organize folks,
but you wanna make some sort of
political change and then
try to enforce that change.
And I remember last last year after
Michael Brown was killed,
I went to Ferguson,
spent a week there, and it was
really an amazing experience
and very frightening from day one.
But, and I really really
clung to that idea
that, all right, between
running from tear gas,
running from police
officers, running from,
not knowing who you're gonna
see when you get there,
all this other stuff, really holding
almost religiously to
this idea that you need to
when you're talking to people in the doors
and you're registering people to vote,
you're getting stories
from people on the street
that it's all going to go into this
policy change, you're gonna implement
the policy change, and
then you're going to,
that's how you're going to save yourself.
But I remember afterwards
talking to somebody,
being documented as,
there was a documentarian
who was getting to organize
her stories on paper,
and I remember when it hit me
that that's not enough,
because I just had,
you know, there was a
beautiful baby black girl
who I am the father of,
and suddenly that just vanished.
Then I knew that that's
not necessarily enough.
And, I think that as an
organizer who hasn't always
respected the academy and
what they have to offer,
I then realized you also
have to change minds,
and that's something that
the academy specifically
cultural and social
anthropology is so great at.
My question is how do you do that
'cause we sorely, you know,
people that are out there
doing activism, whether it's on Twitter,
whether it's in the physical space,
how do you do that?
How do you do that without being
accused of aiding and
abetting, because you know
both spaces are very
politicized, how do you do that
and keep yourself safe?
Because I think it's something that we
very very much need, but at the same time,
people don't want to end their careers
and that's a real thing that
we have to keep in mind.
Thanks.
(mumbling)
- [John] So is the question,
can you just repeat the question, is it
how do you change minds around--
- [Voiceover] No it's just more of a
how do you sort of appear as
people who working to create change,
activists, whether you're...
(mumbling)
We sorely sorely need your help,
like how would you provide that help
without being accused of being...
(mumbling)
That even fact that Black Lives Matter
panel at a conference, some
people on the surface...
(mumbling)
- [Shalini] Seeming non objective.
(mumbling)
- [John] Okay, you can now go.
- [Leith] Well I think in the academy
it's not so much aiding
and abetting, but you're
accused of a lack of objectivity.
And I think we have hopefully
debunked that myth that
there is some objectivity out there.
We know that all of us
have political views,
and there are those who pretend to be able
to separate themselves from those views
when they do research, but you know,
I think we've spent a number of years
speaking against that.
Now, I think another thing to keep in mind
is that what is important
is how good your research is.
Not so much what side
of the fence you're on,
so you're gonna have good researchers
and bad researchers on
both sides of a question.
And, you know, I would argue that
you can do better research
by working with a social group
that you find out things
that you wouldn't know
if you were standing on the outside.
And so I think it's a researcher method,
it's very effective.
- [John] Sorry, I'd say that
academics or people
that engage in academic
pursuits maybe need to
rethink their relationship
to the academy.
You know, there are other ways to be
academic intellectuals,
or other ways to engage
the subject matter that either straddle
that allow you to move
between the sort of activists,
and more sort of
traditionally academic spaces.
So, I mean I think it's,
what you're asking is it
presents an interesting
opportunity and an
interesting question to really
help us think about
what's our relationship
to the academy?
And how do we communicate
this subject matter,
analytical, theoretical, to people who
don't engage in the struggle
on an every day level
at the grassroots, grass tops.
'Cause I mean I think that
there doesn't necessarily
have to be that
polarization, so I think it's
partly on us to think about ways to
address that polarization
to kind of diffuse it and
develop some new channels,
new relationships,
new dynamics to sort of straddle or move
out of the academy and move in, now that's
a challenge because there are sort of
professional and career
choices to be made,
but they are choices to be made.
- [Yarmiar] I wanted to say something
quickly about that too.
First, thank you for
coming, I really appreciate
you being here, and I'm
glad that this has become
a space in which we can
have a larger conversation,
but also I think what
you're saying is real that
there is a significant risk involved
and there has been incidents of professors
getting in trouble, losing
their jobs, over things
that they have said in class or Tweeted,
so it's about what we do in the classroom,
but we also have to think about what we do
in the kind of public sphere as well,
and so one thing, I think
there's a larger conversation
that we can have about how we can
aid and abet each other as activists
in academics, and part of what academics,
what we need, is we need to defend tenure.
We need to also combat against the
precarity that is happening in the academy
and the increased, you know,
we have more adjuncts teaching
than tenured faculty, and they don't have
the same protections
that tenured faculty have
so I think that tenured lives
also need to be defended
because we need to have
the freedom to take risks
in the classroom because
we could get fired
over Tweets, but we can also get,
I've gotten evaluations, class evaluations
where my students have said that I
have taken positions
in relationship to the
Iraq War, in relationship
now to Black Lives Matter,
I was told that I...
Students said in my
evaluation that I did not
give a fair portrayal of
Darren Wilson's side of
the story in my discussion of Ferguson.
Fortunately it was countered by many other
comments in the evaluations that
students appreciated the discussion of
topics that we had in class,
but we can't always
count on those students
filling in their
evaluations 'cause sometimes
the ones that are really
riled up and angry
are the ones that do that, so,
my kind of just a comment to your question
is that I think we, as
academics, we have to
be aware of those risks
and think carefully about
how do we create safe spaces
for ourselves as well.
Yeah, yeah.
- [Raymond] Okay, just because
I haven't said anything yet,
I'll say very briefly, I also think that
one version of what's at
stake is a question about
objectivity stands in
the academy, assumptions,
but I think it's also really about
academics interrogating their own fears.
Right, so even when it's a
relatively low risk situation,
even tenured faculty with
the protection of tenure is
often terrified.
We often don't know
what we're terrified of,
or why, and I think so
some of it's about us
thinking really clearly about how and why
we've internalized I think often
so much fear, and that
translates into a version
of cowardice that makes us unable
to be good allies, and so I think,
thinking that through
is really important too.
- [Yarimar] Maybe we can
take a few questions.
- [Shalini] Yeah, we can
take a few more questions,
I wanted my panelists
to please say their name
and also, try to keep your questions brief
so we can get through a
few of them, thank you.
- [Voiceover] Hi everyone, my name is
Vanessa Diaz, I'm an
assistant professor of
Latino Communications
at Cal State Fullerton,
and my question's kinda
two parts specifically for
John and Jonathan,
John I'm just wondering if
you can talk a little bit more
about the idea of
revisiting the basic claims
about our project, and what are we doing
as anthropologists because I
think as you and many other
people know, those people
who do focus on issues
of race particularly in the US context
kind of end up on the outskirts
of anthropological discussions, and so
aside from having spaces
like this how do we go about
reshaping or rethinking
the anthropological project
to include those things
so that those of us
doing that work aren't
just deemed ethnic studies
or American studies
scholars, and not relevant
to anthro, and then, as
an extension of that,
Jonathan, you mentioned you know how
race is absent from analyses often,
and I'm wondering if you
can talk a little bit about
the theoretical frameworks that you used
in making very clear and deliberate space
for race in your analyses,
particularly in the case of
Latinos and how race is
questioned around issues of
Latinidad.
So, and thank you all for
your amazing comments.
- [Raymond] Take a few questions?
- [Yarimar] Yeah, let's take a few.
- [Shalini] All right,
we'll take a few questions
and then all respond at once, thank you.
- [Voiceover] Hi, my name's Dave Crockett
I'm an associate professor of marketing
actually at the University
of South Carolina,
so my broad question really is,
every presentation actually
made me think so much
about suburbanization as a particular
instantiation of the local,
throughout every one, you
know Twitter activists,
activists generally,
the suburb is so often
the space in which these things happen
and it seems to have very unique features,
and I grew up in north St. Louis County,
so I know Ferguson quite well,
and there are some things
that are unique about the
cluster of small places
that are right there
and how that structures the way the police
really, and the way
that taxes get collected
and so forth, so I'd love for you all
to just say a few words
about suburbanization
and its role.
- [Voiceover] Hello, my
name is Devin Arlington,
I'm actually a senior at
the University of Missouri,
and took part in the concerned student
of 950 protest in living in the tents
as a student, but now coming off of that
I wanna continue my
pursuits in activism in that
as an aspiring anthropologist,
and to write about it
'cause I was the only
person there that can
possibly write about it as an ethnographic
kind of way,
but having these fears
that haven't been kind of
talked about that like
not being able to talk about it, right,
or whatever is talked about
where I might write might come up later
in my academic career, 'cause I plan on
getting my masters and PhD and having that
kind of follow me and see how that, um...
The kind of intersection
that I'm at right now,
kind of follow me throughout
the rest of my career.
- [Voiceover] Hi, everybody,
Denver Thomas, University of Pennsylvania,
two just really quick
comment slash provocations
I suppose, having to do with the
knowledge project aspect of some of the
things that you guys said,
Shalini, one of the things
that struck me about
how you talked about the safe space
of Black Twitter and digital activism,
I think another important
aspect of that is
about where women participate
in activism and how act as certain forms
of activism are gendered spaces.
And it seems to me that if you
are a single mom and you have two kids
who are young and sleeping,
you're not going to
be out on the street,
so I think it's another
interesting dimension
that needs to be brought
into the discussoins
about activism, and Jessica
Winegar has a really nice
piece in American Anthropologist
a couple years ago about
what it meant to be a woman
watching Tahrir Square
you know, with Egyptian
women who weren't there
but were in their homes,
and the other thing is
just an aspect of what John said,
that I want to make sure
doesn't get sort of brushed,
swept under the rug, which has to do with
the approach to what we do,
and the project of knowing, right,
which has been an imperial project,
and I think what's important
about what you said
and what a number of us
have been committed to
I think, is that this
knowledge project has to be
a relational knowledge project,
and it can not be about
explaining what the natives
do to the non-native,
right, and I think that's how we
develop stronger relationships
with activists, with community organizers,
with whoever the various stakeholders are
that we want to talk but that is
an approach that needs
to be reflected upon
and adopted outside of this room,
and outside of the spaces
with which we are engaged
and I feel that it's a
transformation in the understanding
of the production and
generation of anthropological
knowledge that's been
called for again and again
and again, but hasn't necessarily been
truly understood and adopted, and I think
it's important.
- [Shalini] Okay we'll
take one final question,
go ahead.
- [Voiceover] Thank you very much,
my name's John Clark, I'm from the
United Kingdom, so I need to confess this
I am neither an anthropologist
nor an American, so.
(laughing)
You can discount me if you wish,
I wanted to make two quick connections,
one was to what I think
I was the John Jackson
paradox about race as
a social construction,
so I think you're right
that we won that side
of the argument, but missed the bit about
social constructions kill people.
That they are material and consequential,
because social constructions sound so
ephemeral and light and delicate,
and the material bit is
the hard bit now to win.
The other was about the way Jonathan said,
and I think he's right,
that in Europe we are always
astonished by the presence of race.
It's nothing to do with us.
(laughing)
In any way whatsoever,
and as I left the United Kingdom,
the leader of the Labor Party
my uncle Jeremy Corbyn, was being publicly
trashed and humiliated for
hesitating, and I mean
it no stronger than that,
hesitating over whether the
military and the police post-Paris
should adopt a shoot to kill policy.
And Corbyn said,
"I'm not sure that a shoot to kill policy
"is the right thing to do."
Since when the media and
other political parties
have nailed him as damaging the security
of everybody.
And, amnesia plays a critical
role in these moments
because everybody in that moment forgets
that the people that we shoot to kill
are always non-white.
We know who the enemy is.
And they are black, Brazilian,
they are just from elsewhere.
Thank you very much
everybody, great panel.
- [Shalini] Lee, were you able to hear
any of the questions?
Yes?
- Yes, I...
(audio cuts out)
- Here's the 10 second
recap, the first one
was about Latinas and
Latinidad, directed to Jonathan,
the second one was about suburbanization,
why things keep happening in the suburbs,
the third is about
repercussions on writing
will it come back to be
damaging if people do it
early career, the other the comments about
looming and the project of knowing,
and then the final comments
about the UK of rights.
- [Jonathan] Okay, I'll
say a little bit about
race, Latinos, et cetera, um,
so and this is kind of
following up on the previous
comment which is that
we've done a great job
of showing that race
is a social construct,
et cetera et cetera, so what we have in
anthropology and other social science,
well anthropology is worse than others,
but we have a deep
comfort with the notion of
ethnicity which doesn't
deserve scare quotes,
but race deserves scare
quotes when we talk about it.
So ethnicity is a self evident fact,
it's something that we can talk about,
it's readily recognizable, and analyzable,
race is not, and so what
happens with this notion
that race is a social
construct is that it evades
theorization, and so then the question is
on the one hand, who can be
a theorist to follow up on
John's question, but
also, what is deserving
of theorization, and so
race is often positioned
as this topic that is not to be theorized.
So, to use Latinos as an example
of how we might retheorize race, I mean
again as I mentioned in my
comments, I think we talk
about moving beyond
the black white binary,
which is just so troublesome,
because often we talk
about the browning of America,
and this kind of thing,
and it really is about a
displacement of a conversation
around blackness, rather
than a reimagination
of how race works.
So, we imagine race as a spectrum
where you have a white
and a black end of a pole
and then every other
category fits in between that
spectrum, but what if
we reimagined race as a
constellation of categories that can be
reconfigured in powerful
ways, and oriented
and co-constitutive of categories
and related to one another
but not as a spectrum, because
I think it doesn't get us
very far, it doesn't help
to tell us a whole lot
about people's experiences of exclusion,
inclusion, et cetera, so...
- [Yarimar] I just wanted to say thank you
to Dev for your comment,
I fully agree and I think it,
you know, I need to think about it more
but I think it speaks to
the larger question of
we need to not think
about Twitter as a kind of
unmarked space but a very
marked space in social
media in general, in which
people are bringing their
embodied experiences
and gendered experiences
to the floor, and it has been,
I need to think about it more
'cause I hadn't really thought
about it, but I do think
we've seen a lot of sexuality
activists also very involved
and gender race activists,
so I think it's an important
question so I appreciate it.
- [Shalini] Lee, do you
want to comment on any
of the questions or say anything further?
- Yes, I'm...
(audio cuts out)
I would like to comment...
Is that better?
- [Shalini] Yeah, that's better.
- I would like to comment about the
hiding and repercussions as
well as sort of picking up
on something that was said earlier about
when not to use anthropology, particularly
in theorizing around race,
this summer I thought the Rachel Dolezal
I don't know what to, coming out party
people had, it's a great
example or great way
to sort of talk about
the plasticity of race
and identity and that
technically we're all
from Africa, and you can
claim blackness if that's
a part of your family heritage at all,
but I got tore up in Twitter,
I mean people just came
just like right after me just like,
"How dare you can do that."
And I thought a little bit that
in some respects I miscalculated
because I didn't understand how identity
and that she was kind of lying, or she,
I used perhaps a wrong example to make
a basic anthro 101 point,
but I do think we have to be careful
what Raymond said in the beginning,
you know, what we say
does have repercussions,
people actually read it, and
we have to be mindful that
politics and the ethics of this powerful
analysis theory and approach that
we have the tools to use,
and it was humbling, I think Twitter works
in that respect because
it enables people to
really forcefully talk about
an analysis in a really
sort of safe space, but
it also was an example
for me, what I find that
didn't think through the
ethical aspects of sort of
making a point about
anthropology, so I think
we all need to be mindful but move forward
as well as we push our analysis
into the public sphere.
- [Shalini] Do John, Raymond, Leith,
anyone wanna say anything?
- [Leith] Uh yeah, I'd like
to address the question of
repercussions for activism,
because I think it is a
very serious question,
and one that would be good
to think about carefully.
What I tell my students,
some of whom are here,
is to be strategic,
but be principled.
So that, um, you know we want more people
in the academy who are...
Who have a social justice orientation,
so this means often
that if you're going to be active,
you do your activism,
but then you also have to
meet the requirements of the academy,
even if you don't
particularly agree with them.
And, unfortunately, 70
percent of all classes
in the US are now taught by
adjuncts, as I think you pointed out.
And, this means that
first of all they don't
have freedom of speech,
but it also means that
tenure is kind of on the decline.
Now, once you get tenure,
you are usually able
to be freer about
what you want to do, and
what you want to say.
But I think even while you're in the early
stages of the career, you make choices,
and you decide how important
something is to you,
and I think you balance things out,
you never be unprincipled
if you can do it,
and finally I think it helps
to develop a community,
and how you develop
a community depends on where you are.
But you really need a
community at your back,
so that when something
happens you have people that
can help you out.
- [Shalini] And we're
a little out of time,
if either of you want to say something
Raymond or John?
- [Both] No, we're good, we're good.
- [Shalini] Okay.
I just want to thank all
of our panelists again,
and thank Lee for bearing with us
and thank you all so much for coming.
I just also wanted to see,
I was passing around a sheet for people to
note if they considered themselves experts
and would provide their
contact information so
anyone know where that sheet is?
Okay, I'll have fun looking
for it after the panel,
oh no it made it all the way up here,
thank you, so if you do consider yourself
to work on this topic, thank you,
please feel free to put
your information down,
thank you all so much again,
I really appreciate
this wonderful dialogue.
(applause)
