Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I’ve been thinking more about further studies.  I rolled in my head the thought of myself as a black, female anthropologist.  And the thought of it rubbed me the wrong way.  Part of my distaste has to do with the history of racism in the field as discussed in the post “Stuff White People Like: Anthropology, apparently” over at Zero Anthropology.   Another consideration was this sense that as a black person studying anthropology, one can’t just study anthropology, one has to be an active and aggressive ambassodor for genuine cultural diversity.  While I might encounter difficulties as a black woman studying physics, interacting with the mostly white and male population in that field, I wouldn’t be also burdened with the same kind of sense of needing to fix physics at a fundamental level or the sense that the average physicist I encountered wasn’t really thinking like a physicist.  In the Fall 1997 issue of Michigan Today, anthropology student Jennifer A. Scott says, “Many of us Black anthropology students and students from formerly colonized countries say that we are trying to ‘decolonize anthropology.’ We mean that we are trying to extend the field beyond the regional area where we conduct our research to include the academy, itself, as an object of anthropological inquiry.”  The article in Michigan Today presents the views and thoughts of three female anthropology students.

I’ve spent the week browsing around the net and I have more links.  I’ve also written much more on the topic inside my head.  When it came time to put words actually on the page, I was slow/hesitant to do so.  I’ll write more next week.

Yours truly,

S.