Takami Shiratori Delisle

Anthropology has long claimed its antiracist identity because of its multicultural research emphasis. Indeed, anthropological theory and methodology have much to offer for understanding systemic inequity. Yet, the recent debates on decolonizing U.S. anthropology and letting anthropology burn confirm that U.S. anthropology has not reconciled its colonially informed history and knowledge production and continues to marginalize racially minoritized scholars. Caught in the web of power relationships and the layers of white gaze in the hierarchical structure of historically white academic institutions, racially minoritized students are the most vulnerable. Focusing on graduate training experiences of racially minoritized anthropologists across generations and subdisciplines in historically white anthropology organizations across the U.S., this book illuminates how they navigate through and confront U.S. anthropology’s complicity to white liberalism, a part of colonial white supremacism bestowing the fallacy of post-racial color-evasive ideology. Drawing on fifteen months of multimodal ethnographic research, the book features these anthropologists’ stories to highlight how racializing marginalization processes are embedded in mundane moments of anthropology organizations’ daily operations, such as making and managing diversity initiatives and emotional exchanges with white professors and fellow students. Connecting across these seemingly isolating experiences, the book demonstrates a radically different approach to anthropology graduate education.