As global consciousness over racial inequality sharpened during the 1960s, a liberal anthropology affirmed that race does not exist. But racism, the socially-organized result of race ranking, clearly did. During the 1930s and 1940s in the USA, several social anthropologists had studied racism in southern bi-racial communities and in northern black ghettos, and their work highlighted contradictions between the US creed of equality and the practice of racial segregation and oppression (Bond 1988; Davis et al. 1941; Drake 1987:44–6, 341). Anthropologists also began to explore the historical formation of racialized societies, comparing local regimes (in *Latin America, the *Caribbean, the USA, South Africa, Britain) in terms of racial categorization and political economy (Banton 1983; Drake 1987, 1990; Harris 1964). But with few exceptions—Eleanor Leacock’s study (1969) of institutionalized racism in New York City public schools was one—by the 1970s anthropologists focused more on *ethnicity (expressive processes of cultural identification) than race (repressive processes of social exclusion). While some went as far as to subsume race within ethnicity, or to euphemize race with ‘colour caste’, *‘plural society’ or ‘duality’, others joined Banton (1983) in stating the need to study ethnicity and race, particularly in societies marked by both White/Black racialization and by White (and Black) ethnic heterogeneity (Drake 1987:58–60).
Still, ethnicity has captured more of the anthropological imagination in recent decades than has race. Ethnographic studies of race in community politics, in schools and housing estates, and in household worker-employer relations (see Cock 1980 on South Africa) are few; Benson’s (1981) careful study of the social networks and acceptance of inter-racial couples in South London is virtually alone. This situation is likely to change in the 1990s. Global South-North and East-West movements of people are making European and North American societies increasingly more multiracial. As ‘the empire strikes back’, *refugees flee repressive societies, and the world’s poor see the future as much in transnational terms as do the rich, so do racial heterogeneity, *identity politics and resistance to inequality more and more mark the major institutional landscapes of neighbourhood, workplace, university and political arena, and even *kinship and *marriage (Gregory and Sanjek 1994).
In these circumstances anthropologists ponder not only new research topics, but also the effects of racism and its institutionalization (which no longer requires overt racist attitudes) within their own discipline.
The African-American social anthropologist St Clair Drake began his career in the 1930s but despite professional achievements could not do fieldwork in Africa during the 1940s because †Melville Herskovits, who chaired the principal funding committee, believed that Whites could do objective research in that continent but Blacks could not (Bond 1988). Closer to the present, while anthropologists work and the discipline is widely established in a people-of-all-colours world, by 1989 some 93 per cent of US anthropologists in full-time academic positions were White, even higher than the 89 per cent White figure for all full-time US academics (Alvarez in Gregory and Sanjek 1994), or the 76 per cent White population (which includes persons of North African and Middle East origin) counted in the 1990 US census.
Banton, M. (1983) Racial and Ethnic Competition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Benson, S. (1981) Ambiguous Ethnicity: Interracial Families in London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Bond, G.C. (1988) ‘A Social Portrait of John Gibbs St. Clair Drake: An American Anthropologist’, American Ethnologist 15:762–81
Cock, J. (1980) Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation, Johannesburg: Ravan Press
Davis, A., B.B.Gardner and M.Gardner (1941) Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Drake, St C. (1987, 1990) Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, 2 vols, Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California
Gould, S.J. (1981) The Mismeasure of Man, New York: Norton
Gregory, S. and R.Sanjek (eds) (1994) Race, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
Harris, M. (1964) Patterns of Race in the Americas, New York: Walker
Leacock, E. (1969) Teaching and Learning in City Schools: A Comparative Study, New York: Basic Books
Montagu, A. (ed.) (1964) The Concept of Race, New York: Free Press
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