Ms. c. badeaux engl 102 i1spring 2021essay ii a significant
1. Ms. C. Badeaux
ENGL 102-I1
Spring 2021
Essay II: A Significant Change
Now that your Prospectus established your project and its
focus, this essay will address a significant change or way of
looking at your chosen topic. This might include a trend, new
discovery or understanding, interventions, uses, or opposition
associated with the topic. See your Composition and Rhetoric
Guide (and class notes) for specific details about this paper.
Unlike in your Prospectus, you will not announce your
intentions but instead will make a claim or clear argument about
the importance (not to you personally, but for a general
audience) of this narrowed topic. Begin with a general stage-
setting to introduce the topic and to set up your argument, then
use individual paragraphs or blocks of paragraphs to develop
your points and provide support (using resource materials).
Remember to tie each section back into your thesis statement, to
keep the reader focused on your argument. Your conclusion, of
course, will sum up your argument (without restating all your
points or examples) but also develop the significance more.
This time, you will incorporate your sources into your own
writing. Be sure to follow ethical procedures to distinguish
your own words and ideas from those of your sources. Use
MLA style to do so, and don’t rely on citation tools to correctly
do this for you. The best help is in your Seagull handbook, the
mla.org website, Purdue OWL, the MSU library website, and
the Write to Excellence Center. Your workbook also provides
some basic format guidelines. There is no reason to turn in a
poorly-formatted essay, and certainly no excuse for plagiarism.
Also, make sure your Works Cited page is part of the same
electronic document as your essay so it all uploads smoothly
into Turnitin. Do not “orphan” your Works Cited page. It is on
a separate page from your essay, but is stapled together with
2. your hard copy and is on the same electronic file.
Get assistance from me or the WTEC tutors if you have
questions or concerns. And don’t wait until the last minute.
Source requirements:
3 sources minimum (5 maximum)
· at least 2 scholarly secondary sources (from academic
journals)
· at least 1 primary nonfiction source
· If you include additional sources (not substituting the above,
required sources), they may include a secondary nonfiction
book source (reliable but not necessarily scholarly), and/or a
creative media primary source source. The creative source
cannot be a nonfiction source or opinion piece: it must be
something created (painting, poem, sculpture, story, movie,
television show, choreography, etc.). It should be thoughtful
and supportive of your argument. Additional sources may
include any other reliable source of any type (your choice!) that
is appropriate for academic audience and purpose.
Please see me if you have questions about your sources.
Other Essay II requirements:
· 1,000-word minimum length (NOT counting the Works Cited
page).
· MLA format (get assistance from WTEC if you need. Essays
will not be accepted if not in correct format).
· Must submit materials to the assigned Moodle/Turnitin link,
on time. This includes the final draft (with Works Cited
included in same file), a thoroughly marked (by you) rough
draft (see syllabus and policies), plus electronic copies of
source materials.
· Due date: Monday 8 March 2021.
Re-read all instructions here and in Comp. Rhet. book.
Avoid 0 for not following directions!
3. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
Raciontologies: Rethinking Anthropological Accounts
of Institutional Racism and Enactments of White Supremacy
in the United States
Jonathan Rosa and Vanessa Dı́az
ABSTRACT This article presents a theory of raciontologies—
the fundamentally racialized grounding of various
states of being—that sheds light on complex forms of
institutional racism and white supremacy. We are interested
in exploring not only how institutional contexts and processes
function as sites or vehicles for the reproduction
of white supremacy but more specifically how institutions
become endowed with the capacity to act in their own
right. This approach represents a raciontological perspective
that attends to the central role that race plays in
constituting modern subjects and objects in relation to
particular states of being. Raciolontologies powerfully shape
how entities become endowed with the capacity to engage in
particular acts, while also conditioning perceptions,
experiences, and material groundings of reality. Our
4. theorization of raciontologies combines anthropological
analyses
of institutional racism and ontologies beyond the human. These
analyses point to the role of institutions in the
reproduction of white supremacy and reimagine the range of
entities capable of action, respectively. The broader
goal is to suggest how new ways of understanding the
raciontological nature of institutional enactments of white
supremacy can inform antiracist theories of change. [race,
ontology, institutional racism, white supremacy]
RESUMEN Este artı́culo presenta una teorı́a de raciontologı́as –
la base fundamentalmente racializada de varios
estados del ser– que arroja luz sobre las formas complejas del
racismo institucional y la supremacı́a blanca. Estamos
interesados en explorar no sólo las formas en que los contextos
institucionales y los procesos funcionan como sitios
o vehı́culos para la reproducción de la supremacı́a blanca, sino
más especı́ficamente cómo las instituciones llegan
a estar dotadas de la capacidad de actuar en su propio derecho.
Esta aproximación representa una perspectiva
raciontológica que atiende al rol central que la raza juega en
constituir sujetos modernos y objetos en relación a
estados particulares del ser. Las raciontologı́as poderosamente
dan forma a cómo entidades llegan a estar dotadas
6. about institutional racism and racial profiling are pressing
features of contemporary US and global public discourse.
Many of these discourses, and analyses thereof, consider
how institutions—and their related bureaucratic structures,
policies, and procedures—impact everyday life in significant
ways, yet institutions’ capacity to act often escapes analysis in
favor of examinations of the individuals who populate, orga-
nize, and animate them. This article approaches institutional
racism as a process that involves the construction, coordina-
tion, circulation, surveillance, and, frequently, overdeter -
mination of racialized models of personhood and broader
materialities. We are interested not only in how institu-
tions structure actions but also in the processes through
which institutions become actors in the reproduction of
white supremacy in their own right. We conceptualize racial
profiling as an institutionalized, semiotic process. Whereas
racial profiling is often understood as a problem involving
discriminatory behavior at the individual level, we focus on
the institutionalized processes that shape and often overde-
termine individual construals of profiled entities. Examining
various incidents that can or have come to be articulated
in relation to racial profiling, we show how the ontolog-
ical statuses of bodies, practices, and various materialities
are racially constituted in relation to the institutionali zed
modes of perception through which they are apprehended.
Thus, apprehension in the context of racial profiling must
be conceptualized both at the level of individual perception
and institutional consequentiality. Our analysis points to the
role of institutions in the reproduction of white supremacy,
reconsiders the range of entities capable of action, and, cru-
cially, highlights how race (trans)forms ontologies.
To understand the central role of race in constituting
modern states of being, we propose the concept of raciontolo-
gies, which combines anthropological analyses of institutional
racism and ontologies beyond the human. By synthesizing
7. insights from these literatures, it becomes possible to un-
derstand institutions as actors, on the one hand, and various
ontologies’ fundamental anchoring in race, on the other.
That is, while institutional racism has emerged as a crucial
framework for conceptualizing racism as an endemic struc-
tural phenomenon and not simply a problem at the level of
interpersonal bigotry or discrimination, we emphasize the
ways that institutions operate not only as sites for but also
actors in the reproduction of white supremacy. Relatedly,
while anthropological engagements with the ontological turn
have attuned ethnographic attention to human and nonhu-
man actors, we point to the need to reconceptualize race as
a key element in constituting modern ontologies.
We examine instances of institutional racism and racial
profiling drawn from ethnographic research and popular
accounts to demonstrate the potential benefits and limita-
tions of various approaches to documenting and analyzing
these phenomena; we also point to examples situated in a
range of institutional and interactional settings to emphasize
that racism is an endemic modern antagonism rather than a
problem particular to any specific institution or individual.
We illustrate part of what is at stake here by pointing to a
particular instance of institutional racism tied to an example
that emerged in the context of Hollywood-based fieldwork
conducted by Dı́az that resulted in the death of one of her
research participants. Yet, we emphasize that it is not an un-
usual case. In fact, it represents the kinds of daily and deadly
state-sanctioned institutional racism and white supremacy
fundamental to the founding and continued reproduction of
the United States as a settler-colonial project.
Our analysis of raciontological phenomena interrogates
institutional processes that select what counts as evidence
to purportedly discover particular things about targets of
8. racial profiling and examines how these discoveries are often
legitimated by the notion that such processes are unbiased
or accidental in the conclusions they draw. We also con-
sider how members of broader publics come to discover
institutional racism and racial profiling as systematic rather
than accidental and how they respond to problems that are
(re)produced by institutions and not simply human actors—
or how institutions come to be understood as actors in their
own right. The broader goal is to suggest how new ways
of conceptualizing the raciontological nature of racial profil -
ing and institutional enactments of white supremacy, which
challenge empiricist assumptions about shared perspectives
on dramatically disparate racialized realities, can inform an-
tiracist theories of change.
ANTHROPOLOGIES OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
ACROSS CONTEXTS
Analyses of institutional racism within anthropology and
related disciplines have sought to disrupt Western liberal
ideologies that frame “racism merely as interpersonal prej-
udice or discrimination” (Page and Thomas 1994, 110).1
Such individualist framings suggest that racism is an ex-
ceptional, idiosyncratic phenomenon that can be eradicated
through behavior-oriented interventions. In the context of
racial profiling, this might look like antiracist police-training
efforts. However, from an institutional perspective, chang-
ing individual behaviors does little in terms of transforming
fundamental power structures. Indeed, institutions might
implement various trainings in “diversity, equity, and in-
clusion,” but this is often merely a mechanism for nominal
legal protection and the superficial cultivation of positive
affect rather than an effort toward transforming institutional
structures (Ahmed 2012). In contrast, Evelyn Barbee (1993,
349) argues that racism should be understood as a “system of
structural inequalities” and a “historical process.” Enoch Page
9. and Brooke Thomas (1994, 111) elaborate on this analysis
by suggesting that racism should be understood in relation to
“white public space” as a fundamental power structure that
122 American Anthropologist • Vol. 122, No. 1 • March 2020
was “created during colonial times” and “is still being cre-
ated today, in its postcolonial forms” (see also Hill 1998). For
Page and Thomas (1994, 111), US white public space, “in its
material or symbolic dimensions,” comprises “all the places
where racism is reproduced,” which “may entail particular
or generalized locations, sites, patterns, configurations, tac-
tics, or devices that routinely, discursively, and sometimes
coercively privilege Euro-Americans over non-whites.”
This spatial analysis emphasizes the totalizing nature of
white supremacy as well as its capacity to structure hierarchi -
cal relations across institutional contexts. However, there
is a slippage in the distinction between the institutional and
individual (re)production of racism and white supremacy.
At times, white public space is positioned as an inanimate
site—as the “places where racism is reproduced” (Page and
Thomas 1994, 111). In other instances, white public space
is an actor that is “transformative in its capacity to reshape
its racial control practices” (111). That is, while analyses
of institutional racism seek to challenge ideologies of in-
dividualism, there is variability in the ways that embodied
individuals are positioned as the locus of action within such
analyses.
Bornstein’s (2015) examination of institutional racism in
the context of zero-tolerance policing in New York City fo-
cuses on “policies of administrative systems” rather than “cog-
nitive racial bias.” For Bornstein, whereas cognitive racial
10. bias highlights “conscious and unconscious associations, neg-
ative and positive, about things and people in the world” (52),
“institutional racism characterizes a system in which policies
that do not necessarily refer to race nevertheless reproduce
and sometimes intensify racial disparities and hierarchies”
(53). Bornstein also analyzes how purportedly colorbli nd
policies and technologies organize policing in relation to
the accumulation of statistics and crime mapping. These
policies, technologies, statistics, and maps work in concert
to naturalize the criminalization of racialized populations
and communities. Statistical crime measures, visual map-
pings of criminalized activity, and zero-tolerance policies
that criminalize particular populations co-articulate with re-
lated forms of marginalization (e.g., residential segregation,
socioeconomic structures) to enact white supremacist polic-
ing practices. In addition to examples of institutional racism
in the criminal justice system that disproportionately tar-
get African Americans and Latinxs,2 such as zero-tolerance
policing and disparate federal sentencing guidelines for crack
versus powdered cocaine, Bornstein identifies patterns in
housing policies that (re)produce segregation and socioeco-
nomic stratification, as well as education policies that struc-
ture school funding in relation to local property taxes and
impose high-stakes assessments. In all of these cases, “in-
stitutional policies operate with or without conscious or
unconscious bias, although there is a reinforcing connection
between the two” (54). This is similar to the suggestion that
“rules, regulations, and norms [can be] ‘set up in such a
way that they automatically operate to the disadvantage of
some racial groups’ despite the absence of deliberate intent”
(Harrison 1997, 395; quoting Drake 1987, 34), which is
characteristic of forms of “colorblind racism” (Bonilla-Silva
2014) and “racism without races” (Balibar and Wallerstein
1991; Harrison 1995) across institutional settings.3
11. The notion that institutional policies, rules, regulations,
and norms “operate” emphasizes the ways nonhuman enti-
ties’ capacities for action are not simply derivative of human
practices. Thus, rather than absolving or condemning in-
dividuals for the racist acts in which they engage, a focus
on institutional enactments of racism makes it possible to
understand not only the orchestration of such behaviors
but also how they co-articulate with forms of racism that
supersede the individual. The following section takes up
questions surrounding relationships between individuals and
institutions as actors, as well as broader conceptualizations
of entities endowed with the capacity to act, by turning
to a discussion of race and the ontological constitution of
things.
RETHINKING INSTITUTIONAL RACISM AND THE
“ONTOLOGICAL TURN”
In 1955, the Caribbean philosopher Aimé Césaire wrote,
“My turn to state an equation: colonization = thingification”
([1955], 2001, 42). Insofar as the emergence of modern
racism can be conceptualized as a justification for colonial -
ism, we must also analyze the relationship between racial -
ization and thingification. This relationship was illustrated
during the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the killing
of Trayvon Martin, a fifteen-year-old African American boy.
During his closing arguments, Mark O’Mara, Zimmerman’s
defense attorney, disputed the prosecution’s claim that
Martin was an unarmed teenager. O’Mara carried a slab
of concrete into the courtroom and displayed it before the
jury. He suggested that Martin was in fact armed with the
sidewalk, which he allegedly used to bludgeon Zimmerman
during their altercation, thereby constituting Zimmerman’s
use of a firearm as a legitimate form of self-defense. Zim-
merman went on to be acquitted.
Seemingly objective things were fundamentally and
12. consequentially transformed in the encounter between
Zimmerman and Martin, as well as the legal recontextu-
alization thereof. Zimmerman perceived the can of juice and
pack of skittles Martin carried as potential weapons or drug
paraphernalia, his hooded sweatshirt as thug wear, his slight
stature as threatening; meanwhile, Zimmerman’s attorney
argued that Martin’s very presence weaponized the sidewalk.
Thus, things, including candy, soft drinks, sweatshirts, side-
walks, cellphones, and cameras are only constituted as such
when they are inhabited and animated by—that is, index-
ically grounded in—normative whiteness.4 It should come
as no surprise, then, that for those who perceive the world
through what Du Bois (1903) formulated as a racial veil
that produces experiences of double consciousness, there is
significant question as to whether they are experiencing the
same things as those who are not.5
Rosa and Dı́az • Raciontologies 123
Thinking back to Césaire’s equation of colonization with
thingification, it is crucial to reconsider the fundamental role
of racial domination in constituting the modern order of
things. In fact, we might examine the interplay between racial
thingification and anthropological empiricism—how white
supremacy constitutes things without being recognized as
functioning in such ways. Following Kamala Visweswaran
(1996, 73), we ask, “If race is only epiphenomenal, how
does it continue to ground material reality?” This is not
simply an important consideration for societies rooted in
histories of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide, such
as the United States, but rather across a modern world
that has been profoundly shaped by the global imposition of
colonial distinctions and hierarchies. In her analysis of these
white supremacist configurations, and contestations thereof,
13. Christina Sharpe (2016, 21) notes that anti-Blackness is a
“total climate,” which she formulates as “the Weather.”
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) established race
as a fundamentally ontological problem.6 He writes, “I came
into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in
things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source
of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the
midst of other objects” (109). Fanon articulates a theory of
race as ontological overdetermination. Building on Fanon’s
thinking, Afropessimist thought insists that the nature of
race, and Blackness in particular, must be understood not
in terms of a conflict that can be resolved by redistribut-
ing rights and resources in prevailing political and economic
orders but rather as an ontological problem that is the foun-
dation of modern governance and subjectivity (Sexton 2016;
Wilderson 2010). That is, modern governance is institutional
racism.7
In some ways, this framing of institutions as actors can
be understood in relation to the move toward an anthro-
pology of the posthuman and the study of ontological logics
that differentiate human and nonhuman entities. However,
in our analysis of institutionalized forms of racial profiling,
we highlight the ironic avoidance of race, racism, and racial-
ization in recent anthropological accounts of ontology that
seek to examine and expand the range of entities understood
to be endowed with the capacity to act. Karen Brodkin,
Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson (2011) argue that this
race avoidance is endemic within anthropology. Indeed, a
statistical analysis of anthropological texts demonstrates that
anthropologists actively avoid the topic of race relative to
other forms of difference, such as gender and class (Ahearn
2013). While the “ontological turn” has received a great
deal of attention in anthropological literature over the last
decade (de la Cadena 2015; Kohn 2013), and while studies
14. in Indigenous contexts are often the reference point for al -
ternative ontological realities (Todd 2016), race has largely
been absent from these analyses. In fact, one of the most
central and compelling components of race is its capacity
to transform particular subjects into objects—or, in the
context of institutionalized modes of profiling, into targets
of surveillance, measurement, management, remediation,
expulsion, and extermination. How might the “ontological
turn” be disrupted if we understood that modern ontologies
are profoundly anchored in race?
More than twenty years ago, Sylvia Wynter (1994) theo-
rized the institutional transformation of particular racialized
persons into nonpersons. In the aftermath of the Rodney
King beating, the acquittal of the officers involved, and the
subsequent public rebellion, Wynter analyzed the use of
the category “No Human Involved” within the City of Los
Angeles’s criminal justice system to refer to alleged African
American and Latinx gang members who were shot or killed
by police. Wynter argued that the category “No Human
Involved” was part of broader institutional logics that sanc-
tioned police officers’ use of chokeholds that killed multiple
young Black men. At the time, Police Chief Darryl Gates
attributed these killings to Black men’s abnormal windpipes
(Wynter 1994).
In a more recent case, New York City police offi-
cer Daniel Pantaleo used a similar chokehold to kill Eric
Garner, an unarmed African American man who was selling
loose cigarettes.8 Video recordings of both the Rodney King
beating and the killing of Eric Garner prompted widespread
public outrage, yet none of the officers involved were con-
victed of criminal charges (in the case of Garner, no criminal
charges were filed; in the King case, two of the officers were
eventually found guilty of violating King’s civil rights). The
15. inability of these recordings to legally delegitimate police
officers’ actions reflects the need for a reconsideration of a
racialized semiotics of visibility. As Charles Goodwin (1994,
606) notes in his analysis of the institutionalized “professional
vision” through which the King recording was interpreted,
“the ability to see a meaningful event is not a transparent,
psychological process but instead a socially situated activity
accomplished through the deployment of a range of histori -
cally constituted discursive practices.9” It is now customary
for police officers to wear body cameras to document their
actions, and yet videos of police officers assaulting and killing
unarmed and compliant individuals continue to surface regu-
larly; thus, Goodwin’s insights help us to understand the lim-
itations of these body cameras as a check on police violence.
These cases demonstrate how institutionalized per-
ceptions of racialized persons transform their ontologies.
Rodney King was described as a “PCP-crazed giant,” even
though he never tested positive for consumption and was
huddled in a ball on the ground throughout the beating. This
is similar to Officer Darren Wilson’s description of Michael
Brown, the unarmed African American teenager he shot
and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. In the
grand jury hearing, Wilson referred to Brown as “it,”
characterized him as a “demon,” and said that he “felt like
a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” even though he
and Brown were the same height (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).
Twelve-year-old African American Tamir Rice was illegible
as a child playing with a toy gun when Cleveland police
shot and killed him within two seconds of encountering
him.10 Institutionalized perceptions of racial difference can
124 American Anthropologist • Vol. 122, No. 1 • March 2020
16. overdetermine what kind of a thing one is and authorize
extreme, indeed existential, measures.11 The sections that
follow demonstrate the implications of the co-constitution
of race and ontology—raciontologies—across a range of
interactional and institutional contexts.
RACIONTOLOGIES AND INSTITUTIONALIZED
DISPOSABILITY
Analyses of institutional racism and white supremacy must
grapple with the ways various institutions—even those
seemingly unrelated to one another—work in tandem to
reproduce formations of power. The concept of raciontolo-
gies can provide insight into this interinstitutional coordi -
nation by drawing connections among systematic, racialized
perceptions and attributions of deficiency and disposabili ty
across contexts. Dı́az encountered these racialized percep-
tions and attributions in her fieldwork with celebrity pho-
tographers, centering on Hollywood as a major cultural and
institutional force that wields larger systemic power. Over
the last two decades, the demographics of the Los Angeles
paparazzi transitioned from a labor force predominated by
white men to men of color—mostly Latino. In the wake of
this shift, figures across Hollywood industries characterized
the new paparazzi as unprofessional and dangerous.12 This
critique was often framed in explicitly racialized terms, fo-
cused on whose bodies were producing this media content and
how that devalued the work and potential professionalism
inherent in the work itself (Dı́az 2014). It quickly spread
into public discourse, with news articles referring to pa-
parazzi as “untrained,” “corner-cutting” “foreigners working
on . . . questionable visas,”13 and online reader comments
calling them “bottom feeders”14 and “illegals”15 who should
“be deported.”16 The unique positions paparazzi occupy, de-
mographically and professionally, within the labor chain of
celebrity media production, have made them convenient, if
problematic, scapegoats for the current climate of celebrity
17. obsession in the United States.
In October 2012, Dı́az was introduced to Chris Guerra
by paparazzi photographer Galo Ramirez—one of the main
collaborators involved in Dı́az’s Los Angeles–based field-
work, which focused on race and gender in the produc-
tion of celebrity media, and specifically on the work of and
relationships between the predominantly Latino paparazzi
photographers and predominantly white women celebrity
reporters who produce content for celebrity magazines.
Guerra was an aspiring paparazzo who had only recently
begun working on a freelance basis for the same agency for
which Ramirez worked. Ramirez was instructed to mentor
Guerra, and Dı́az photographed one of their training sessions
as they waited near Heidi Klum’s Pacific Palisades mansion.
Guerra simultaneously practiced his photography using Dı́az
as a subject. Her photos of his training were shown during
his memorial service.
Guerra was struck by multiple cars and killed on New
Year’s Day in 2013 as he followed a California Highway
Patrol (CHP) officer’s orders to return to his car after trying
to photograph Justin Bieber’s Ferrari in Los Angeles. Guerra
was twenty-nine years old. According to witness testimony
and dashcam transcriptions,17 the Ferrari was pulled over for
speeding. When the passenger of the Ferrari told the officer
that Guerra was videotaping the stop, the officer focused his
attention on Guerra and let the car’s occupants go, despite
having stopped them for speeding and questioning them
about the scent of marijuana in the car.18 Mainstream news
outlets reported that when the officer ordered Guerra to
return to his car, he did not look both ways before crossing
and was therefore hit.19 In official statements, the officer and
investigator declared that Guerra’s death was his own fault.
The dashcam transcription tells a more complicated story.
18. After releasing the individuals stopped in the Ferrari, the
officer asked Guerra, “What the hell are you doing?” When
Guerra explained that he was a photographer and a member
of the press, the officer asked, “Do you have any credentials
other than you just standing there?” As the officer’s tone
became more aggressive, Guerra exclaimed, “OK, alright!
Relax!” The officer then scolded Guerra, explaining that
the paparazzi should not hassle people and demanded that
he return to his car, which was parked across four lanes
with no nearby crosswalk. Guerra’s last words were, “All
right, brother.” Guerra was hit by one SUV and then by
a second car as he attempted to return to his vehicle in
accordance with the officer’s command.20 The officer then
stopped traffic, eventually calling for help. There was no
attempt to revive Guerra, despite the CHP officer’s training
in CPR. The dashcam later recorded the officer talking to
his partner, “Dude I was just like, I just told him he couldn’t
stand there. Fucking idiot, man.”
Despite Guerra’s position as the victim in this situation,
the discourse surrounding his death—from the officer who
was present at the scene to celebrities and the public—
treated him as a nuisance and his death as a relief. Reacting
to the incident, Miley Cyrus posted a series of tweets in
which she called the paparazzi “fools,” also stating:
Hope this paparazzi/JB21 accident brings on some changes in
’13.
Paparazzi are dangerous! . . . It is unfair for anyone to put this
on to Justin’s conscious as well! This was bound to happen!
Your
mom teaches u when your a child not to play in the street! The
chaos that comes with the paparazzi acting like fools makes it
impossible for anyone to make safe choices.
Comments from viewers of online video reports of
19. Guerra’s death echoed many of these sentiments, …
JONATHAN ROSA
Stanford University
YARIMAR BONILLA
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Deprovincializing Trump, decolonizing
diversity, and unsettling anthropology
A B S T R A C T
After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US
presidential election, there was widespread public
and scholarly outcry that particularized this
historical moment. But the tendency to
exceptionalize Trump obscures how his rise reflects
long-standing political and economic currents, both
domestically and globally. By contrast, the effort to
deprovincialize Trump effectively locates his
electoral win within broader historical, political, and
economic assemblages of which it is but one part.
This entails examining how colonial and racial
legacies shaped perceptions of the 2016 election, as
well as the role of anthropology in the contemporary
political landscape. [race, colonialism, diversity,
liberalism, anthropology, Donald Trump, United
States]
A
fter the 2016 US presidential election, many of those who op-
posed Donald Trump’s candidacy felt shocked, betrayed, and
depressed by the news of his victory. Political commentators
suggested that large swaths of the population were experienc-
ing “collective trauma” and suffering from “Trump traumatic
20. stress disorder.”1 Widespread protests denounced the rhetoric
of Trump
and his supporters, and there were calls for members of the
Electoral Col-
lege to use their position to challenge his victory. While we
share the gen-
eral concern over the impact of his win, and believe that
anthropology can
and should play a critical role in examining the importance of
this mo-
ment, we contend that there is just as much to be learned from
the reac-
tions to the election as there is from the results.
If taken at face value, these reactions suggest that the election
marks
an important shift. From some perspectives, Trump seems to be
moving
the United States into an uncharted future while also sending it
back in
time to an era of overt racism and sexism that many people
thought had
been superseded.2 Concerns about these haunting pasts and
potential fu-
tures intensified in the wake of the election as authorities
registered a dra-
matic rise in hate crimes and displays of overt racism, which
were thought
to be relics of the nation’s past.3
But not everyone interpreted the election as surprising or novel.
Indeed, Trump’s victory unfolded in an era when anti-Black
violence had
gone “viral,” when videos of police brutality and civilian hate
crimes ap-
22. American Ethnologist � Volume 44 Number 2 May 2017
Live in a sketch that aired a few days after the election (see
Figure 1).4 The sketch features an election-night party at
an apartment with Hillary Clinton posters decorating the
walls. There are four white and two Black attendees (the
latter portrayed by guest host Dave Chappelle and special
guest Chris Rock). The white attendees, citing polling data,
anticipate a “historic night” in which the United States will
elect its first woman president. But Chappelle’s character
remains skeptical and suggests that while it might be a
“historic night,” they should remember that “it’s a big
country.” As the evening wears on, and it becomes clear
that Trump will win the election, the white attendees dis-
play shock, dismay, and anxiety. The sketch ends with one
of the white characters saying that Trump’s election “is the
most shameful thing America has ever done,” in response
to which Chappelle and Rock share a knowing glance and
double over with laughter. Although the sketch is farcical,
its humor lies in its effective parody of liberal white Amer -
icans’ shock and dismay upon discovering the nation’s
capacity to elect a candidate as distasteful as Trump.
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted the
wrongheaded thinking of scholars and others who over-
looked the racist foundations of the United States in their
dismissal of her suggestion, more than nine months be-
fore the election, that “this nation could absolutely elect
Donald Trump.”5 Similarly, Melissa Harris-Perry, a politi-
cal scientist and keynote speaker at the 2016 American An-
thropological Association meetings, asked, “Since when are
racism and sexism disqualifiers for president?”6 From in-
tersectional feminist perspectives, racism and sexism are
significant contemporary challenges rather than retrograde
modes of discrimination. Thus, it is important to consider
differing views on power structures that characterize the
23. past and present United States, and the ways that these van-
tage points lead some subjects to interpret the 2016 elec-
tion as consistent and logical as opposed to shocking and
unprecedented.
What ethical principles have been upheld, reconfig-
ured, or violated in the 2016 election? On what grounds is
this election a breach of justice versus a logical outcome of
the forms of racial democracy and racial capitalism that are
fundamental to the US nation-state project? Although we
do not minimize the devastating impact that this adminis-
tration’s policies will have, or the new president’s ominous
behavior, we are wary of exceptionalizing the current mo-
ment. Our goal is thus to deprovincialize Trump, that is, to
locate his election within broader historical, political, and
economic assemblages of which it is but one part.7
In addition, we question anthropology’s role in the
broader political landscape that produced Trump. Follow -
ing the election there was a swift critique of how pollsters
had gotten it “wrong” and a suggestion that ethnogra-
phers could provide a more useful account of the nation’s
political climate by attending to what people do and not
simply what they say.8 In addition to overlooking the
linguistic anthropological insight that language is itself a
crucial form of social action, this perspective elides an-
thropology’s complicity in reproducing the broader socio-
cultural and intellectual climate that enabled the rise of and
the reactions to Trump.9 Given the suggestion that Trump’s
election requires us to rethink the modes of social science
that got us here, what does this imply for anthropology?
How has anthropology’s engagement with questions of race,
diversity, coloniality, intersectionality, and US society con-
tributed to the current bewilderment over Trump’s election?
To what extent should this moment serve as an occasion
24. for thinking not just about where anthropology should go
from here but also about how we got here in the first place?
Rethinking conceptualizations of race, diversity,
and racism
Many commentators have noted that this election is pro-
found evidence of how far removed the United States is
from the mythical postracial society that was allegedly ush-
ered in and secured with the two-term presidency of Barack
Obama (Bonilla-Silva 2014). Postracial ideology reduces an-
tiracism to a rejection of biological racial inferiority rather
than calling for the dismantling of the colonial institutions
and power relations through which race is (re)produced.
This ideology thus contributes to a paradoxical invest-
ment in racial difference so long as it is institutionally
domesticated as diversity and inclusion (Ahmed 2012).
The presence of racialized bodies in strategic, often highly
visible, positions is presented as evidence that racism has
been eradicated and racial equality achieved, even while
underlying institutional structures remain fundamentally
unchanged. In this context, racial “diversity” becomes a
highly valuable commodity and a powerfully legitimizing
institutional force (Shankar 2015; Urciuoli 2016). This logic
constructs racism in relation to unequal access to existing
institutions and forecloses considerations of how some
institutions need to be comprehensively reconstituted
or abolished altogether rather than simply “diversified.”
“Diversity” can thus participate in reproducing power
relations and exacerbating their effects. This is perhaps
best evidenced by how the first US president of color did
not destabilize but in fact legitimized—and in many ways
amplified—perpetual imperial war, mass deportation, and
mass incarceration.
Rather than pursuing inclusion-oriented and body-
25. based diversity projects, we might seek to decolonize di -
versity by locating the origins of race in coloniality rather
than bodies. This implies understanding that “race is not
in the eye of the beholder or on the body of the objecti -
fied,” but instead “an inherited western, modern-colonial
practice of violence, assemblage, superordination, exploita-
tion, and segregation . . . demarcating the colonial rule
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Deprovincializing Trump � American Ethnologist
Figure 1. A screenshot of Saturday Night Live’s “Election
Night” sketch, which aired November 12, 2016, featuring (from
left) Aidy Bryant, Dave Chappelle,
Chris Rock, Beck Bennett, Cecily Strong, and Vanessa Bayer.
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
of Europe over non-Europe” (Hesse 2016, viii). Efforts to
understand and eradicate racism must thus grapple with
both how racial difference is historically constituted and
how it is institutionally reproduced and rearticulated in the
present. Focusing merely on present-day forms of racism,
such as those that have gained attention in the wake of the
2016 election, does not allow us to see how contemporary
US race relations articulate long-standing forms of colonial-
ity, and how US racial dynamics are linked to broader racial
formations worldwide (Pierre 2013).
The characterization of Trump’s election, as well as re-
lated global events such as Brexit, as exceptional effectively
delinks present-day racism from colonial histories of power,
disavows US settler colonialism, and silences critiques of
global coloniality. This decoupling of race and colonial -
26. ism is evident in many calls to eradicate white supremacy
following the election. Whereas previous invocations of
white supremacy often called attention to the fundamen-
tally racist orientation of the United States (Smith 2012), the
term is now increasingly being deployed to refer to new and
emerging threats to US political stability rather than foun-
dational orienting structures of US society. It is thus im-
portant to distinguish between quotidian and exceptional
forms of white supremacy. After all, white supremacy is
not reducible to Donald Trump, his supporters, and the Ku
Klux Klan. The composition of liberal universities, as well as
the methodological practices and epistemic foundations of
progressive academic disciplines, also evidence pervasive
forms of white supremacy.
In the case of anthropology, the discipline’s methods
and forms of inquiry emerged from the mission of study-
ing nonliterate peoples, thereby anchoring its intellectual
project in racialized colonial distinctions between modern
and premodern societies (Trouillot 2003). This history is
replicated in contemporary anthropological conversations
that continue to be predicated on the absence of Black and
Indigenous theorists as scholarly interlocutors. Despite ef-
forts to create a more “collaborative” anthropological praxis
(Atalay 2012; Lassiter 2005), most anthropological debates
carry on without engaging critiques made by non-Western
scholars or scholars of color. In other words, although there
is room for native voices, there is rarely room for native
theory (Bonilla 2015).
We have been troubled by collective conversations
about what anthropologists can and should do in response
to the rise of Trump. We believe the more important ques-
tions are, What have anthropologists already done? And
why have past critical interventions in the discipline failed
27. to gain broader traction? Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1991)
critique of anthropology’s “savage slot,” and Faye Harrison’s
(1997) call to decolonize the discipline, long ago demon-
strated that anthropology is co-constitutive of the very
hierarchies that are positioned as somehow outside it.10
For Harrison, anthropology’s colonial foundations produce
disciplinary insights that are often “complicit if not in fact
collusive with the prevailing forces of neocolonial domi-
nation” (1997, 1). Considering that Trouillot and Harrison
made these arguments more than 25 years ago, the fact
that the era of Trump is heralded as a brand-new challenge
deeply reflects the problem. It is evident that anthropolo-
gical practice in the era of Trump must remain attentive to
the epistemic grounds of our academic traditions and to
the enduring coloniality of the US nation-state project.
Making America liberal again?
Liberal performances of vulnerability, suffering, and
anxiety in the aftermath of the election include the
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American Ethnologist � Volume 44 Number 2 May 2017
Figure 2. Demonstrators in Wisconsin show solidarity with the
Standing Rock water protectors, October 30, 2016. (Joe
Brusky/http://
overpasslightbrigade.org) [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
discursive claim that Trump poses a threat to fundamental
US democratic institutions, as well as calls to secure these
28. institutions’ integrity—the Janus face of Trump’s slogan,
Make America Great Again. Based on this formulation,
which US democratic institutions’ purported integrity
is endangered? When exactly were the criminal justice
system, public education, the military, and the CIA not fun-
damentally rooted in and reproductive of racial democracy
and racial capitalism?
After the election some hoped that the judiciary and
legislature would provide checks and balances or that the
Electoral College might operate as a fail-safe. This view ig-
nores the fact that certain governmental structures like the
Electoral College were put in place not to ensure a progres-
sive government but to secure the power of slave-holding
states and to uphold state-level sovereignty. The US com-
mitment to federalism, within the context of an imperial
state formation, has always overshadowed the commitment
to democracy. This is why US citizen-subjects outside the
federation, in places such as Puerto Rico and Guam, re-
main disenfranchised: they belong to an empire, not a state
(Burnett et al. 2001).11
The framing of Trump as an exception to, rather than
an indictment of, liberal democracy presents this moment
as one of recuperation and rescue rather than of reimagi -
nation. The discursive investment in securing the nation’s
fundamental democratic institutions involves erasing their
role in constituting the violent settler-colonial history of the
United States and its ongoing manifestations (De Genova
2007; Goldstein 2014; Jung 2015; Simpson 2016). Instead of
focusing on defending the “traditions” of US democracy,
we should ask what alternative political and economic
orders are possible, indeed necessary. What populations
and communities have long been imagining and enacting
these alternatives, and how might we take our cue from
29. them? From creating local parallel institutions to reimag-
ining alternatives to the nation-state, what alter-political
possibilities might we consider (Hage 2015)? Rather than
waxing romantic in simplistic ways about the comforting
liberal optics and civility of the Obama era, we should
turn our attention to the many social movements that
emerged during the Obama administration, such as Black
Lives Matter and the movement to block the construction
of an oil pipeline through the Standing Rock reservation
in North Dakota (see Figure 2).12 What forms of enduring
structural inequity and contradictions of liberal rule do
these movements evidence? We should examine how
these communities have long been contesting the political
formations that preceded and made possible the rise of
Trump while enacting new alternatives that seek to decol-
onize liberal institutions, rather than simply “diversifying”
them.
There are reasons why decoloniality has recently
emerged as a watchword, particularly within the academy.
Movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and the recent
protests at Yale University have tried to tackle the in-
sidious colonial logics and forms of institutional racism
within institutions of higher education.13 Beyond simply
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Deprovincializing Trump � American Ethnologist
Figure 3. Yale students show their solidarity with the Rhodes
Must Fall movement and its objective of decolonizing
education, March 31, 2015. (Houriiyah
Tegally/Yale African Students Association) [Color figure can be
viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
30. calling for cosmetic diversity, these movements suggest
that it is inadequate to merely include people of color in
untransformed institutions; instead, they call for a compre-
hensive unsettling of colonial logics and institutions (see
Figure 3).
Anthropology would do well to take a page from these
movements. Once the “study of savages” fell out of fashion,
there were stirrings within the discipline for greater change
as evidenced by the writers of the “decolonizing gener-
ation” (Allen and Jobson 2016). As Jafari Allen and Ryan
Jobson assert, scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
Faith Harrison, and Leith Mullings (to whom we would
add Talal Asad, Vine Deloria Jr., and Renato Rosaldo) laid
the groundwork for precisely the kind of epistemic shifts
that our current moment is begging for. Yet the “post-
modern turn” in the discipline shifted the conversation
away from what could have been a radical reassessment of
anthropology’s underpinnings and assumptions.14 As the
discipline failed to reinvent itself and find a new purpose
beyond the “savage slot,” it also failed to find relevance
in public debates. The contemporary rearticulation of
the “savage slot” into the “suffering slot” (Robbins 2013)
has been an inadequate response to this quandary, often
reproducing the same long-standing tropes and racialized
hierarchies that have characterized the discipline since its
origins.15
Current calls to make anthropology “matter” are cer-
tainly welcome, but they must be accompanied by a critical
assessment of our disciplinary orientation, epistemic
ground, and collective purpose. The study of human diver-
sity makes little sense unless it can explain how difference
and diversity are produced, why diversity is imagined as a
31. hierarchy, and how that hierarchy is replicated and main-
tained. In the case of Trump, rather than chastising the
pollsters and assuming that thick description would have
done a better job, we need to ask what kind of qualitative
analysis would have yielded better insights. Has anthro-
pology produced the kind of knowledge about the United
States as a settler state that is required to understand the
current moment?
Unsettling anthropology
In theory, anthropology should be uniquely equipped to de-
naturalize the idea of American values and attend to how
they form part of long-standing histories of domination—
histories in relation to which Trump’s election must be
understood. Our questioning of Trump’s exceptionalism,
which we frame as an effort to deprovincialize Trump, is
not simply an abstract anthropological exercise in making
the strangeness of Trump’s election familiar. Indeed, many
commentators have warned against the dangers of normal-
izing Trump and the forms of bigotry he has fomented.16 In
contrast, our interest in deprovincializing Trump by con-
necting his election to long-standing histories of domi-
nation involves viewing power structures such as white
supremacy as ordinary, not in their inherent legitimacy
but in their pervasiveness, longevity, and nonexceptional
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American Ethnologist � Volume 44 Number 2 May 2017
nature.17 But just as we must avoid reproducing revision-
ist narratives by seeking to recuperate an inclusive United
States that never was, we must also question the capacity of
32. anthropology to develop ways of seeing beyond its contin-
ued investment in colonial logics.
Anthropology has long staked a claim to being able to
explain how “strange” cultural patterns could be conceived
as “familiar” and vice versa. The classic anthropological
strange-familiar dictum presumes a unique ability to
understand multiple cultural perspectives simultane-
ously. Interestingly, this position has not been examined
in relation to W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1903) theorization of
racialized double consciousness. Du Bois conceptualized
double consciousness as the experience of racialized
subjects—specifically African Americans—“always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others” (1903, 351). This
racially conditioned experience of “twoness” contrasts with
normative subjects’ hegemonic modes of perception. Du
Bois did not formulate double consciousness as a way of
understanding racial diversity for its own sake. Rather, he
sought to interrogate the power relations that oblige racially
marked subjects to perceive themselves from both in- and
out-group perspectives, as well as those that prevent
racially unmarked subjects from perceiving social reality
in alternative ways. These power relations are often lost in
the anthropological familiar-strange dynamic because the
discipline generally tends to valorize different worldviews
instead of interrogating the fraught relations through which
they are co-constituted.
To unsettle the discipline, we must be willing to ques-
tion the primacy of anthropological epistemologies and the
discipline’s claims to unique capacities for seeing multiply,
particularly since the latter all too often remain unrealized.
Unsettling anthropology might thus require recognizing
its limits and accepting that other ways of knowing—
particularly those coming of out Black studies, ethnic
studies, and Indigenous studies—can at times more power-
33. fully assess power dynamics that make the familiar strange
and the strange familiar within the United States. This is
not to say that anthropology has no role to play, for indeed
ethnic studies also frequently fall into the seductive trap of
American exceptionalism. Rather, we believe that de-
provincializing contemporary US articulations of power,
decolonizing diversity, and unsettling the colonial logics of
the academy might help us connect two crucial tasks: in-
terrogating long-standing power formations and imagining
new worlds.
Notes
Acknowledgments. We are grateful to Angelique Haugerud and
Jeanette Edwards for the invitation to contribute to this AE
Forum,
as well as to Shanti Parikh for co-organizing the 2016 American
An-
thropological Association session out of which the Forum
emerged.
Harvey Neptune and Barnor Hesse provided generous commen-
tary on initial drafts of this manuscript. The manuscript also
ben-
efited tremendously from the feedback of Niko Besnier and
Pablo
Morales, as well as the anonymous reviewers.
1. Neil Gross, “Are Americans Experiencing Collective
Trauma?,” New York Times, December 16, 2016, accessed
January
22, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/sunday/
are-americans-experiencing-collective-trauma.html?&_r=0;
Sarah
Jones, “American Women Are Suffering from Trump Trau-
matic Stress Disorder,” PoliticusUSA, November 10, 2016,
34. accessed January 27, 2017,
http://www.politicususa.com/2016/11/
10/american-women-suffering-trump-traumatic-stress-disorder
.html.
2. We have explored similar chronotopic dynamics, or
narratives
of space-time, in interpretations of racialized extrajudicial
violence
as an emergent versus long-standing US problem (Bonilla and
Rosa
2015).
3. Alexis Okeowo, “Hate on the Rise after Trump’s Elec-
tion,” New Yorker, November 17, 2016, accessed January 27,
2017, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hate-on-the-
rise-after-trumps-election.
4. “Election Night - SNL,” YouTube video, 5:36, posted by
“Sat-
urday Night Live,” November 13, 2016, accessed January 23,
2017,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHG0ezLiVGc&feature=
youtu.be.
5. Tressie McMillan-Cottom, “Finding Love in a Hopeless
Place,” Tressiemc (blog), November 27, 2016, accessed January
22, 2017, https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/finding-hope-in-
a-loveless-place/.
6. Erin Corbett, “Harris-Perry on Shock of Trump Win: ‘Since
When’ Are Racism and Sexism ‘Disqualifiers’ for President?,”
Raw
Story, December 16, 2016, accessed January 22, 2017,
http://www
.rawstory.com/2016/12/harris-perry-on-shock-of-trump-win-
35. since-when-are-racism-and-sexism-disqualifiers-for-president/.
7. This effort might include linking Trump’s election to the
global
rise of authoritarian-populist (Hall 1985) figures in the United
Kingdom, France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, Russia,
and
India (for more, see Radjy 2017). Alternately, we could take our
cue from a segment on the Daily Show in which host Trevor
Noah
suggested that, from an African perspective, Trump’s xenopho-
bia, bombast, and cult of personality are reminiscent of leaders
in South Africa, Gambia, Uganda, Libya, and Zimbabwe.
“Donald
Trump—America’s First African President: The Daily Show,”
YouTube video, 7:35, posted by “The Daily Show with Trevor
Noah,”
October 3, 2015, accessed January 24, 2017,
https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=2FPrJxTvgdQ.
We might, however, locate the United States within a
hemispheric postcolonial frame to understand Trump in rela-
tion to the legacies of Latin American and Caribbean caudi l-
los such as Juan Perón, Rafael Trujillo, and François Duvalier
(Neptune 2015). Each of these frames resists viewing Trump
and the United States more broadly as exceptions, and instead
seeks to link this moment to broader political and historical
currents.
8. Huon Wardle, “The Polls Got It Wrong Again . . . the End
of ‘Social Science’? Time to Stop Predicting and Start Listening
. . .,”
Open Anthropology Cooperative, November 9, 2016, accessed
January 24, 2017, http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/
the-polls-got-it-wrong-again-the-end-of-social-science-time-to?
36. xg_source=activity.
9. Trump is said to have minored in anthropology while major -
ing in economics as an undergraduate at the University of Penn-
sylvania. Whatever impact his exposure to anthropology might
have had, the fact remains that anthropology is part of the larger
206
Deprovincializing Trump � American Ethnologist
disciplinary landscape of higher education that produced him
and
many of his college-educated supporters.
10. Following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), we invoke
“de-
colonization” not as a metaphor but as a way of raising
questions
about repatriation, sovereignty, and the need for alternative
politi-
cal and economic orders.
11. Although most residents of US territories are US citizens
they
are not allowed to vote in presidential elections and do not have
voting members in Congress.
12. Efforts to document and learn from the knowledge that
activists and organizers have generated, as well as to disrupt
canonical modes of Western knowledge production, are
reflected
in #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus
(http://www.blacklivesmattersylla
37. bus.com, accessed January 23, 2017), #StandingRockSyllabus
(https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrock
syllabus/, accessed January 23, 2017), and the #Syllabus
movement
more broadly. (For more on the racial implications of digital
protest, see Bonilla and Rosa 2015.)
13. For more see Amit Chaudhuri, “The Real Meaning of
Rhodes Must Fall,” Guardian (London), March 16, 2016, ac-
cessed January 31, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
news/
2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall; and Conor
Friedersdorf, “A Dialogue on Race and Speech at Yale,”
Atlantic,
March 24, 2016, accessed January 31, 2017, https://www.theat
lantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/yale-silliman-race/475152/.
14. Jafari Allen and Ryan Jobson speculate similarly about the
“ontological turn,” provocatively asking, “Why do movements
such
as the ontological turn—like the postmodern turn before …
