AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

RESEARCH ARTICLES
Anthropology as White Public Space?
Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson

ABSTRACT How far has anthropology come in becoming racially inclusive? In this article, we analyze an online
survey of anthropology graduate students and faculty of color undertaken by the AAA Commission on Race and
Racism in Anthropology. Despite some progress, institutional and attitudinal barriers remain. We use the concept
of white public space to analyze these barriers: departmental labor is divided in ways that assign to faculty and
graduate students of color responsibilities that have lower status and rewards than those of their white counterparts.
Colorblind racial explanatory practicesdiscourses that explain away racially unequal institutional practices as being
not about raceare common. We argue that such practices make many anthropology departments feel like white-
owned social and intellectual spaces. We conclude by suggesting steps with which anthropology departments can
create more inclusive social spaces that are owned equally by scholars of color and their white peers. [racism and
anthropology, racial division of labor, diversity, race avoidance, white public space]

A nthropology has a contradictory history when it comes

to race and racism. Historically the discipline has con-
tributed to scientific racism and colonial projects, but it has
also been home to anthropologists who have challenged them
(Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997; Mullings 2005:668669).
Since the 1960s, anthropology has rethought theory, issues
of study, and relations with its research partners. Anthro-
pologists also began to study race and racism in the United
States as well as the persistence of colonial and racist ways of
thinking within the discipline. But has anthropology in fact
decolonized its standard practices and internal culture?
How far has anthropology come in recent decades in
meeting its goal of racial inclusivity? How well have we
created institutional spaces that successfully and equitably
recruit, retain, educate, employ, and reward professionals
and students from racial-minority backgrounds? Answering
these questions requires data and conceptual frameworks up
to the task of understanding the nuances of race and racism.
It also means recognizing that our interpretations will vary
depending on our vantage points.
Our argument is that anthropology departments have
not done well when it comes to decolonizing their own
practices around race. This is neither true of all departments
nor true all of the timebut is still true all too often. We
analyze two kinds of praxis by which departments constitute
themselves as social spaces that are white owned. The first is
through a racial division of departmental labor whereby those
responsibilities assigned to faculty and graduate students of
color have lower status and rewards than those of white
colleagues. The second praxis is cultural and discursive,
including a range of departmental and individual practices
that carry racial baggage but also deny their racial subtexts
and racially unequal outcomes. We use Enoch Page and
Brooke Thomass (1994) concept of white public space to
describe these aspects of departmental praxis because it puts
the emphasis on the social construction of institutional spaces
and refers to the implicit and explicit practices, beliefs, and
values that govern behavior in them.
Our argument is organized into six parts. First, we
explain our conceptual framework. Next, we describe the
survey, respondents, and limitations. Third, we discuss what
we know about the growth in numbers of minority anthro-
pologists over time and compare anthropologys progress to
that of other disciplines. Fourth, we analyze the racial divi-
sion of academic labor in departments. Fifth, we examine
a range of race-avoidant practices and explanatory patterns
that marginalize anthropologists of color and their scholarly
perspectives. Together, the racial division of academic labor
and race-avoidant workplace discourses are key constituents
of anthropology departments as white public spaces. In our
conclusion, we suggest steps for making anthropology de-
partments more inclusive social spaces that are as much
owned by and home to the ideas of scholars of color as they
are for white anthropologists.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 113, No. 4, pp. 545556, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
c 2011 by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01368.x
546 American Anthropologist Vol. 113, No. 4 December 2011
HISTORY AND CONCEPTUAL FRAME
Under the influence of anticolonial and U.S. social move-
ments in the 1960s, anthropology became more reflexive
about its racial and colonial politics and its self-construction
as a scientific enterprise carried out by objective researchers.
In this climate, in 1969, the American Anthropological As-
sociation (AAA) first committed itself to increasing the num-
ber of students and faculty from racial-minority backgrounds
and to expanding the impact of their perspectives on anthro-
pological thought. Its first Committee on Minorities and
Anthropology (CMA) was made up of well-established an-
thropologists of color who set out to study the situation.
Their method was to interrogate their own experiences in
anthropology as the basis for framing their study. They found
that students and faculty of color were leaving the field before
completing their degrees and that some committee members
themselves were either encouraged to leave the discipline
or not encouraged to pursue a professional career in it . . .
[In addition,] many minority anthropologists did not feel that
they could actively encourage minority students to take up a
career in anthropology. Thus, they shifted their assignment
from how to recruit more minorities to analyzing the nature
of the ideology and/or the structure of anthropology, which
acts to exclude, or keep at a minimum, the number of mi-
nority anthropologists in the first place. They also believed
that the dimensions of these ideological and structural char-
acteristics could be exposed by collecting information on the
experiences of minorities in anthropology (CMA 1973:1).
In November of 2007, the AAA established a Com-
mission on Race and Racism in Anthropology (CRRA) to
once again address these questions. The authors of this arti-
cle were members of this commission. In 2009, the CRRA
conducted an online survey of anthropology graduate stu-
dents and faculty of color as a way to learn about those
practices that hinder and those that support diversity in aca-
demic anthropology. Our intention was to identify barriers
and best practices, particularly identification of exemplary
departments and their praxis. Our own racial identities and
theoretical perspectives are pertinent to this article: Brodkin
and Morgen are white, Hutchinson is African American; we
all incorporate critical race theory in our scholarship.
In this article, we analyze the results of this survey and
place it and previous efforts in a wider theoretical context.
There has been some improvement, and we detail it. How-
ever, many of the same exclusionary ideological and struc-
tural elements that the CMA encountered are still prevalent
in many anthropology departments.
Like the CMA, our survey sought the experiences and
analytic perspectives of anthropologists of color, and we
employ these theoretical lenses because they demonstrate
ways of making anthropology more robust and less colonial.
This becomes clearer if we situate them within the context
of anthropologys historical explanatory projects. The first
project makes that which is culturally unfamiliar understand-
able across cultures. The second, complementary project is
to defamiliarize or call into question taken-for-granted as-
pects of anthropologists own cultures. Anthropology pio-
neered the first mode. Its respect and value [of] culturally
diverse epistemologies [and] knowledge sets is what at-
tracted to the field more than one survey respondentsuch
as one who saw anthropology as support[ing] the mainte-
nance of diversity across the world.
Anthropology has done less well in the second mode,
something respondents also pointed out with some fre-
quency. Several described white anthropologists who be-
lieve their training inoculates them against racism, assuming
that because they understood culture(s) intellectually, they
werent racist/sexist/elitist. One respondent suggested
that we as a profession and professionals need to practice
what we preach . . . to do the same with those we see as a part
of our own culture (other academics)particularly if they
may see themselves as a part of the Other themselves. To
not do so is hypocrisy. To do so creates real understanding,
acceptance, and diversity in a department.
The critical, defamiliarizing mode of explanation grew
up largely outside anthropology. Born in the social move-
ments of the 1960s, a robust family of critical scholarly disci-
plines rests on a spectrum of social standpoint theories shared
across anthropology, ethnic, feminist, and queer scholarship.
These theories rest on the notion that our perspectives on
our own culture are shaped by our social place(s) within
it and that the perspectives of subordinated groups within a
society are key to illuminating the ways that daily structures,
institutional policies, practices, and norms are anything but
neutral. Equally central is the recognition that such practices
will be less visible to members of unharmed racial groups and
that the latter will understand and evaluate their meanings
and consequences differently than those harmed by them. As
Mullings (2005) points out, with economic globalization and
the concomitant globalization of race and racelike forms of
invidious distinction, critical race perspectives have become
important analytic tools globally. Thus, theories generated
from the perspectives of racial subordination are critical
(but hardly the only) theoretical contributions that anthro-
pologists of color make to anthropologys core explanatory
project. Part of these contributions involves anthropologists,
especially of color, recovering and building on the research
of earlier anthropologists who studied racism in the United
States (Baker 1998; Bolles 2001; Harrison 1997).
In part because many anthropology departments have
been resistant, as we shall see, critical scholarship has been
most strongly developed in organizational spaces within an-
thropology like the Association of Black Anthropologists, the
Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, and the
Association of Indigenous Anthropologists. The Association
for Feminist Anthropology and the Association for Queer
Anthropology have generated similar theoretical lenses with
regard to gender subordination and homophobia and have,
in recent years, helped develop intersectional frameworks
that also take race seriously.1 Together, these sections and
 Brodkin et al.
their overlapping memberships nurture specifically anthro-
pological versions of critical scholarship from a variety of
complementary social standpoints.
We also set our analysis of anthropologys praxis in
the wider context of postcivil rights U.S. racism. Historian
Nancy MacLean (2006) roots the rise of contemporary racial
patterns in the attack on affirmative action, which began in
segregationist and neoconservative circles during the 1970s.
Neoconservatives redefined racism as overt interpersonal big-
otry, which allowed them to argue that widespread racism is
a thing of the past or at least that it is now widely negatively
sanctioned. Since the U.S. Supreme Courts Regents of the
University of California v Bakke decision (438 U.S. 265[1978])
against university affirmative-action programs in 1978, law
and white public opinion have come to see most kinds of insti-
tutionalized antidiscrimination efforts as special privileges
in fact, they are often codified as reverse discrimination.
Underlying this view is what MacLean calls a zero-sum atti-
tude toward race, which creates competitive relations among
marginalized groups for limited goods. Today, mainstream
rationales for racially disparate institutional outcomes are
more likely to avoid than to directly address race and, in-
deed, often deny that racist consequences rest on racist ideas.
This can lead to the production and reproduction of what
Eugenia Shanklin (1999) calls colorblind racism.
Eduardo Bonilla Silva (2006) describes colorblind racist
practices that disconnect racially unequal outcomes from
racial causes, whether causes are intentional, covert beliefs
about race, or ideas that point to race. He describes four
common narratives by which people deny the persistence of
racism and attribute racial inequalities to other than racial
causes. In the past is past, racism is asserted to be a thing
of the past only. The storyline if other ethnic groups have
made it, how come blacks have not? denies racisms per-
sistence and blames African Americans for their own social
subordination. In the line my ancestors did not own slaves,
whites absolve themselves of any responsibility for current
racism. Finally, I did not get a (job or a promotion) because
of a black man makes the claim that whites are victimized
by reverse racism because racism no longer exists. These
stories have a distinctly conservative ring, but they rest on
assumptions that also underlie the academys racial division
of labor and thinking about race.
Racial inequality remains deeply woven into the fabric of
our social institutions, including the academy, so that todays
racism includes but is far more than merely the cumulative
expression of individual prejudice and bias. Central to its
practice are race-avoidant discourses and patterns of insti-
tutional behavior that nevertheless index race and promote
racially unequal outcomes. Before analyzing anthropologys
specific praxis within this framework, we describe our sur-
vey and the data on which we base our argument.
SURVEY
Our analysis is based on answers to sets of similar sur-
vey questions about barriers and support that respondents
Anthropology as White Public Space? 547
experienced at three key stages of their career: as graduate
students, as new Ph.D.s on the job market, and as faculty.
We also asked for advice and lessons respondents wished
to pass on as well as exemplary departments and practices.
The survey contained both closed and open-ended questions.
The former included multiple choice, yes or no, and fixed
answers. Open-ended questions included an other option
within multiple-choice questions and questions requiring
written responses. We coded open-ended and other re-
sponses and examined both types of responses for general
patterns and variations by gender, ethnicity, and year of
Ph.D. These are our core data.
Because the AAA contains no database from which
anthropologists of color can be identified, we distributed the
survey to members of the Association of Black Anthropolo-
gists (ABA), the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropol-
ogists (ALLA), and the Association of Indigenous Anthro-
pologists (AIA). Although these groups have white members,
the survey was directed to anthropologists of color. Of 108
usable responses, 83 respondents gave an ethnic or racial
identification; 28 did not.2 Of those who did, there were 36
African Americans, 24 LatinosLatinas, 1 Asian American, 2
Afro-Latinos or Afro-Latinas, 14 Native Americans, 3 Native
Americanbiracials, and 3 whites. Because the answers of
the 28 non-self-identifying respondents to experiential ques-
tions did not differ in ways we could see from those who did
identify as nonwhite, we made the working assumption that
they were anthropologists of color.
Our sample then consists of 105 anthropologists of
color: 78 percent of whom have their Ph.D., about half of
those completing their degrees since 2001, and 23 who were
still in graduate school. Women make up 62 percent of the
respondents overallmore than two-thirds of the African
American respondents and almost two-thirds of Native
American respondents but only half of Latino and Latina
respondents. Percentages of women of color in the sample
are higher than the 5658 percent average of women overall
among anthropology Ph.D.s.3
Although useful, this is not a representative sample of
anthropologists of color. First, because there is no association
for Asian American anthropology, we appear to have just one
Asian American respondent. Second, our sample is decidedly
one of sociocultural (83 percent) and linguistic anthropolo-
gists (13 percent). Only four archeologists and one biological
anthropologist responded. Third, minority anthropologists
who are members of these sections might be more likely than
those who are not members to be interested in issues of race
and racism as well as to be studying communities of color in
the United States. In short, this is a survey of the experiences
and perceptions of a variety of sociocultural anthropologists
of color, with a possible bias favoring those who study race
and racism, especially from critical perspectives. Neverthe-
less, given anthropologys broader explanatory project of
defamiliarizing prevailing common sense within as well as
across cultures, we believe this bias to be a productive one
for insights about diversifying anthropology.
548 American Anthropologist Vol. 113, No. 4 December 2011
Our respondents are far from marginal in their place-
ment within anthropology. For the most part, they began
their careers in large, highly ranked departments, mainly
in large ethnically diverse coastal cities. Almost all received
their training at research universities, 43 at public univer-
sities and 28 at private universities. However, 15 of these
schools accounted for 51 percent of our responses, and only
6 schoolsStanford; University of Texas, Austin; City Uni-
versity of New York; University of California, Berkeley;
New York University; and the University of Virginia
trained 29 percent of survey respondents. We divided our
sample into current graduate students, of whom there were
23, and four Ph.D. cohortsPh.D. 196478 (9); 198190
(8); 19912000 (8); 200109 (26)to allow us to examine
changes over time.4
Respondents include senior and junior tenure-track fac-
ulty, non-tenure-track faculty, and graduate students. A
small majority of those with Ph.D.s are employed in anthro-
pology departments (43 of 79 Ph.D.s who gave a current
departmental affiliation) but not all were full time. The
ethnic breakdown of those employed in anthropology de-
partments was 56 percent of African American, 54 percent
of LatinaLatino, but only 32 percent of Native American
respondents. In contrast, few of the insecurely employed
work in anthropology departments. Ethnic and womens
studies were their most common departments, followed by
sociology, with the remainder scattered across a wide variety
of homes ranging from drama to English to religion.
NUMBERS THEN AND NOW
How do past and present states of racial diversity in anthro-
pology compare to each other? There is a general perception
among anthropologists that the discipline has become more
racially diverse since the 1960s but also that it remains over-
whelmingly white. Unfortunately, the data are too sparse
for more than tentative answers.5
AAA data indicate that the number of anthropology
faculty of color has increased since the late 1970s. In the
two decades prior to 1998, the total number of full-time
anthropology faculty rose modestly from 1,266 in 1977
to 1,734 in 1998. However, the percentage of minority
anthropologists among them more than doubled, growing
from 4.6 percent in 1977 to about 11 percent by 1988
from 58 to 191 minority anthropology faculty. Although we
do not know the ethnic makeup of minority faculty in 1977,
between 1988 and 1998 Native Americans made up about
one percent of full-time anthropology faculty, while Asian
Americans and African Americans were each three percent
and Latinas and Latinos were four percent. However, the
number of minority faculty was unchanged between 1988
and 1998 (AAA 1977, 1999:22). We found no faculty survey
for the last decade.
The share of Ph.D.s earned by anthropologists of color
has risen. Between 1975 and 1995, about 400 anthropol-
ogy doctorates were awarded annually. In 1990, minorities
earned ten percent of all Ph.D.s. Between about 1998 and
2009, the number of Ph.D.s rose to 490 in 2009 (National
Science Foundation [NSF] n.d.). Minority percentages rose
to 16 percent in 1996, and for the decade 200009, they
averaged about 14 percent of all anthropology doctorates
annually. At 69 doctorates a year in the last decade, this
has brought almost 700 anthropologists of color to the job
market (AAA 1995, 1996, 1997; NSF n.d.). The large por-
tion of survey respondents with post-2000 degrees and fac-
ulty positions in anthropology is cause for optimism.
It appears that the steep growth spurt in hiring of mi-
nority faculty took place between the late 1970s and 1980s,
before the smaller growth spurt of minority Ph.D.s, which
seems to have begun in the mid-1990s. This timing suggests
that recruitment and mentoring by more faculty of color
may have helped retain minority students and boost the
percentages of minority Ph.D.s in the last 15 years (a view
that our surveys qualitative responses reinforce).
Questions remain about retention and recruitment of
faculty of color in the last decade. In 1998, the profile
of anthropology faculty of color was 17 percent assistant
professors and instructors, 9 percent associate professors,
and 8 percent professors (AAA 1999:22, 24). However,
by 2009, after a long period of consistently rising minority
representation among Ph.D. awards, one would expect the
numbers and profile of anthropology faculty of color to have
expanded, creating a more balanced representation across
the ranks.
Our admittedly unrepresentative survey suggests that
this may not be happening, particularly when we examined
data for 37 tenure-track faculty who listed their rank, depart-
mental affiliation, and year of Ph.D. (see Table 1). Of 13 re-
spondents with Ph.D.s prior to 1991, 9 were in anthropology
departments, while only 4 were not. Four of 5 with Ph.D.s
obtained between 1981 and 1990 were in anthropology de-
partments. Then the patterns shifts: 9 of 19 respondents
whose Ph.D.s were obtained in 2001 or later are employed
outside of anthropology departments. Additionally, no one
in the 19912000 cohort has been promoted to full profes-
sor, despite being in the professional workforce for a decade
or two. Although this cohort seems stalled at associate-
professor status, a smaller proportion of recent Ph.D.s are
entering anthropology departments or earning tenure in
them. Although a majority of respondents in Table 1 with
tenure-track positions are in anthropology departments, a
longitudinal view suggests a possible rotating door that re-
produces a constant number of anthropology faculty of color
despite larger Ph.D. cohortsmany of whom do not work
in anthropology. Additionally, about a fifth of post-2000
Ph.D.s have not found tenure-track positions at all, although
reduced hiring because of leaner budgets may be responsible.
Our survey also suggests a gendered dimension to recent
hiring patterns. There are more women than men of color
in our sample, but the increase in the proportion of women
Ph.D.s does not show up in proportional faculty hiring of
women of color, especially in anthropology tenure-track
positions. There also are more women than men across
 Brodkin et al. Anthropology as White Public Space? 549

Table 1. Association among Tenure Track Employment in Anthropology, Rank, and Decade of Ph.D.

Ph.D. 1980 Ph.D. Ph.D. Ph.D.

Rank or earlier 198190 19912000 200109
Full Anthro dept. 4 5 0 0
Nonanthro dept. 2 1
Associate Anthro dept. 0 0 4 3
Nonanthro dept. 0 1 1 4
Assistant Anthro dept. 0 0 0 7
Nonanthro dept. 0 0 0 5

Total 6 7 5 19

Note: N = 37.

the cohorts in temporary positions. Longitudinal study of
patterns of hiring, promotion, and retention would help
to clarify what might be a revolving (and gender-biased)
faculty door for a relatively static number of scholars of
color in anthropology.
How do we compare with other social sciences? With the
notable exception of psychology, other social sciences seem
to be doing no better than anthropology.6 The American Psy-
chological Association (APA) seems to be the bright light in
a landscape of mediocre progress. Between 1995 and 2004,
psychology consistently awarded a greater percentage of
bachelors and doctoral degrees to minority students than
any other science discipline and at higher rates than the com-
bined average of all social sciences.7 According to an internal
APA report,
Between 1998 and 2003, total APA student affiliate member-
ship declined by 25.9 percent, while minority student affiliate
membership increased by 28.7 percent. Between 1997 and 2004,
ethnic minority participation in APA governance rose by 41.2
percent. Between 1996 and 2004, ethnic-minority recipients of
masters degrees in psychology increased by 90.8 percent, while
ethnic-minority doctoral recipients in psychology increased by
16.6 percent.8
The report also highlights successful strategies to effect
change (task forces, funded activities, and pipeline programs
for recruiting, retaining, and training minority students) and
strategic action plans to ensure these trends continue and
improve. Part but not all of psychologys success can be
attributed to career possibilities outside the academy.
There is much that anthropology can do to make it-
self more multiracial. In the following sections, we focus
on barriers within anthropology departmentsbecause de-
partments are key places where anthropologists constitute
themselves and the discipline as white public spaces. This
concept makes visible everyday practices and beliefs that
appear to be race neutral but that systematically privilege
white actors while marginalizing and subordinating those
who are not racially white. Two practices mark anthropology
departments as white public spaces. The first is a de facto
racial division of academic labor. The second is a set of schol-
arly values and discursive patterns that index racially unequal
ownership of the discipline.
RACIAL DIVISION OF DEPARTMENTAL LABOR
Department cultures, although shaped by university prac-
tice, often create informal job expectations for faculty of
color that are different from expectations of their white
counterparts. Universities are part of a U.S. labor force char-
acterized by persistent occupational segregation by race and
gender. Even in the face of concerted desegregation efforts
in the 1960s and 1970s, when many labor-force sectors faced
pressure to hire women to mens jobs and racial minorities
to white jobs, employers and employees often colluded to
block true occupational integration. Some jobs shifted and
became less well paid, some developed secondary tracks, and
some refused entry to women and racial minorities almost
entirely (Carter and Carter 1981; Glenn 1985; Green 2001).
Informal workplace practices in anthropology departments
partake of this larger pattern of occupational segregation.
It is important to set the racially disparate treatments
that follow in the context of three positive patterns that mark
anthropology departments as racially inclusive spaces. First,
as noted, most survey respondents trained at departments
in research universities. Second, most received some pre-
doctoral funding, and there were relatively few reports of
discriminatory allocation.
Third, and perhaps most important, mentoring of grad-
uate students of color seems to have improved significantly
over the decades. Overall, anthropology Ph.D.s rate their
training and mentoring as consistently poor, or nonexis-
tent, and done almost totally by the advisor (AAA 1995:5,
1997:3; Rudd et al. 2008:iii). In contrast, most of our re-
spondents reported relatively good mentoring. Although
only a third of respondents whose Ph.D.s predate 1981 re-
ported having campus mentors, by the 1990s, 88 percent
did so, and the most recent cohorts reporting remains al-
most as high. Better mentoring may be partly a result of
the increased numbers of faculty of color, but respondents
also report good mentoring from white faculty as well.
550 American Anthropologist Vol. 113, No. 4 December 2011
Nevertheless, a significant minority had no mentors at
all, especially among Native Americans and Latinas and
Latinos. Mentor performance during respondents job
search was mixed, with more reporting almost no assis-
tance than receiving some help. Respondents were equally
negative about their departments professional support and
training as Ph.D.s surveyed by the AAA.
What practices then constitute anthropology depart-
ments as white public workplaces? Expectations for service
and teaching, as well as implicit job descriptions, for faculty
of color differ significantly from those for white faculty, and
faculty of color are expected to do work that is of lower
value for promotion and tenure. Those who are held institu-
tionally responsible for the work of creating a more racially
diverse faculty and student body are disproportionately mi-
nority faculty. As respondents described the amount of time
they spent on this work and the consensus of their colleagues
that it was their job, we came to think of it as diversity duty.
Our first sense of what diversity duty looked like and
how time consuming it could be appeared in answers to sur-
vey questions about barriers to tenure.9 The most common
barriers for respondents were lack of release time for re-
search and high service loads. African American respondents
rated heavy student advising alongside these as their biggest
barriers, whereas LatinaLatino and Native American
respondents rated heavy course loads as major barriers. Re-
duced service loads and manageable student advising loads
were the least available forms of support to faculty. When
we put these answers together with responses to open-ended
questions about support for faculty of color, it became clear
that heavy service and student-advising requirements, as
well as perhaps heavy course loads, were major barriers to
professional advancement.
Departmental and university diversity service was es-
pecially time consuming. One faculty respondent reported
being asked several times to serve on departmental search
committees both within my own and in other departments
since you are a minority. Several respondents experienced
being actively sought after, only to discover that their most
valued attribute was their appearanceso that their univer-
sity or department could have the look of diversity. One
who was so courted discovered that her appointment was
tied to a diversity-related administrative function with little
budget or power. Many respondents described getting little
support from administration or faculty for trying to bring
real racial diversity to academe.
One respondent noted that white faculty members were
not held responsible for such work: As an assistant profes-
sor, in one of my annual reviews, my department chair wrote
that I wasnt active in a campus faculty-staff minority asso-
ciation. I refused to sign the review, responding, If I was
Irish, would you write down that I didnt march in the Saint
Patricks parade? Another pointed out that such practices
suggest that it is only the problem of people of color. If
there are diversity efforts, all faculty and grad students must
be committed. Another respondent echoed these feelings:
For me, the issue hasnt been explicit racism, but when at-
tempting to recruit grad students or faculty, there are several
in my department who are resistant to thinking along diver-
sity lines.
Our survey indicates that many anthropologists of color
were often the only or one of two students or faculty of color
in their department. Expecting numerical as well as racial
minorities to carry the workload of enhancing racial diversity
places undue burdens on faculty of color while freeing white
faculty from responsibility. The other side of such bifurcated
work norms is that white faculty are expected and allowed to
concentrate on their scholarship in ways that their minority
colleagues are not; yet publication is what counts for tenure
and promotion. One respondent wrote: No senior faculty of
color in the department to urge me to be more protective of
my time. As the only African American in the department,
I worked harder to be a good citizen and, in retrospect,
squandered too much of my time on things that meant very
little in terms of tenure and promotion.
Respondents gave examples of daily practices that do
not hold white colleagues responsible for racial fairness. For
example, several reported instances of white faculty agreeing
with a minority colleague that a particular behavior was racist
but refusing to do anything about it. One reported an ex-
tremely racist departmental chair, about whom everyone
knew . . . but no one cared enough to do anything about it.
Another student described initiating a discussion about race
behavior in his or her department and was surprised when
a white faculty member who had seemed like an ally took
public offenseand then later came to offer private support.
A racial division of expectations also applies to teaching
and advising. Departments often value faculty of color for
their ability to teach students of color but not necessarily
white students. Respondents acknowledge the tremendous
needs of students of color and regard this work as important
professional and social labor. Most embrace it willingly, de-
spite the time and effortone called it the Latina/faculty of
color tax in that students of color are immediately sent to
me. Another described himself as the dean of invisible stu-
dents. Both indicated that this work is neither recognized
nor valued by most of [their] colleagues.
Too, as another respondent explained, the language of
recruitment was usually oriented toward diverse faculty for
diverse students, often ignoring the fact that most of the
students Id be teaching and advising were not minorities
and that I had something to offer them as well. However,
teaching white students brought problems that their white
counterparts did not share: If someone had told me the
sheer mental exhaustion of engaging racist undergrads before
I began teaching, I wouldve told them they were lying.
Most universities and departments within them concep-
tualize racial diversity as a general social good rather than
as integral to the intellectual strength or mission of grad-
uate and professional life. Widely reported indifference by
white faculty toward recruiting a racially diverse department
is part of the process by which a white demographic and

cultural norm reproduces itself, seemingly naturally. Within
this context, students and faculty of color are often hyper-
visible as tokens of institutional political correctness but
invisible as scholars in their work settings.
In 1973, the CMA described graduate training as be-
ing organized on two tracks, with white students being
trained for full professional careers and students of color
being trained for secondary tracks as applied researchers or
as informants and research assistants to white professionals.
Susan Carter and Michael Carter (1981) described the emer-
gence of a similar a two-track system based on gender in the
professions, including medicine, law, and academe as a re-
sponse to the entry of more women to professional training.
They showed that primary and secondary tracks of specializa-
tion emerged with women diverted to less prestigious, less
autonomous, and less well-paid specialties. For example,
women predominated in pediatrics and family practice and
domestic law while surgery, anesthesiology, and corporate
law remained male-dominated fields. Many respondents de-
scribed their graduate training in analogous ways.
Racially disparate treatment in professional attention
was a marker. Respondents told of advisors offering white
advisees opportunities to co-write, write, present at con-
ferences with fellow students or faculty but not offering
the same to students of color. Others reported being given
passing grades but no comments on their work, while white
students got greater attention. One student whose work was
timely and of good quality asked why the advisor had not
provided comments and was told, It seems you dont want
to be part of us.
More specific were reports of white faculty who treated
students of color as research assistants and cultural brokers
rather than scholars-in-training. A student who wanted to
pursue a career in urban applied research directly after fin-
ishing a masters was strongly advised by a faculty mentor
of color to complete the Ph.D. Without it, Ph.D.s are go-
ing to use you up; they will employ you to collect their
data, and theyll do the thinking. This student went on to
a Ph.D. program and found the warning borne out; the stu-
dent never wanted for work, doing professors fieldwork.
Another described a professor who wished me to accom-
pany him to Africa to be his go-between with the natives
although this would have yielded no advantage to me and
would greatly have delayed my ability to complete my pro-
gram of study. . . . He wished to exploit me for his gain be-
cause of my minority ethnic status. A third, whose day job
was in an area an advisor wanted for a field site, had to take
extreme measures to avoid being coerced into becoming a
sponsorinformant. Some respondents reported being val-
ued for my language and cultural insight, not for my intellect
and getting minimal guidance or professionalization.
An important conceptual foundation of a secondary
track for anthropologists of color is a common assumption
that outsider status is the desired norm for anthropological
research. This marks insider researchers negatively, most
notably marking their knowledge as folk or local but not
Brodkin et al. Anthropology as White Public Space? 551
scholarly. Several respondents noted that among white
anthropologists it was more acceptable for people who
are white to be praised for their study of people of color
than for the work of anthropologists of color on people
who are white. A Native American faculty member who
asked if there were any Native American students in the
schools Indian studies program was told we study Indians
here; meanwhile, the schools anthropology department
made it clear to this respondent that it was not good for
an Amerindian to teach about Indians as there would be a
problem with objectivity.
Misguided notions of objectivity contribute to disparate
treatment. For example, working on hip-hop, race, etc.,
[is] often seen as predictable and limiting intellectual en-
gagements performed by those who were already native
before they became anthropologists. Of course, whites can
research these topics at will. Anothers advisor discouraged
continuing graduate study, labeling my research [as] specif-
ically related to my identity; because research concerning
people of color is only of interest to people of color.
In sum, taken-for-granted practices of racially dividing
labor mark anthropology departments as white institutional
spaces. They include assigning diversity work to faculty of
color, while giving it little value for tenure and promotion,
and freeing white faculty from responsibility for it. Informal
practices that train students of color for a paraprofessional
track reinforce long traditions of treating members of subor-
dinated communities as study subjects and native informants
rather than as professional colleagues. The message is that
minority anthropologists are not full professionals.
RACE-AVOIDANT DISCOURSE AND PRACTICES
INDEXING RACIALLY UNEQUAL OWNERSHIP
We need to acknowledge that white anthropologists percep-
tions about things pertaining to race, especially in daily aca-
demic life, are often at odds with those of their colleagues of
color. When anthropologists of color describe something as
discrimination or as an inequality-producing practice, white
colleagues may see their views as exaggerated, ill founded,
or only true of the past. Let us recall that anthropologys
resistance to the epistemologies of ethnic-studies scholarship
to examine disciplinary praxis led underrepresented anthro-
pologists of color to create their own institutional spaces in
the AAA from which to develop critical and theoretically
informed scholarship.
These perceptual differences underlie two explanatory
stories that illustrate discursive ways in which anthropology
departments constitute themselves as white public spaces.
The first defines the boundaries of proper anthropological
scholarship while avoiding its racial subtext and racially dis-
criminatory outcomes. The second employs different kinds
of binary or competitive reasoning to deny intentionality and
responsibility for racially unequal outcomes.
Regarding boundaries, many respondents were told
that the subject matter of their work, especially studies of
U.S. communities of color and patterns of racism, do not
552 American Anthropologist Vol. 113, No. 4 December 2011
belong in anthropology. Several were encouraged to leave
anthropology and move to ethnic studies. Native American
respondents often felt rejected by their departments, which
expressed little interest in living Indigenous communities
as partners. Many respondents felt forced to look outside
their departments for professional communities. When try-
ing to build networks around my research interests, I had to
look out to neighboring universities and professional orga-
nizations other than the AAA (i.e., LASA). This is a difficult
hurdle to surpass, especially as a graduate student trying to
establish a solid research question thats significant beyond
the discipline of anthropology.
A lack of courses and faculty research on race and racism
sent indirect messages about the boundaries of anthropol-
ogy. Only 15 percent of all respondents found departmental
support for classes in their areas of interest. Not until the
2001 cohort did anyone report support for such classes;
but even among current graduate students, with the highest
rates of support, slightly less than a quarter reported being
able to find classes in their research areas. Rates differed by
ethnicity: 28 percent of African Americans reported some
support while zero percent of LatinasLatinos and Native
American respondents did.
Anthropology marks its boundaries by theoretical per-
spectives and explanatory projects as well as subject matter.
Respondents to our survey encountered resistance similar to
that reported in 1973 to scholars of color actively shaping the
directions of anthropological thoughtand, notably, they
mentioned hostility toward critical theoretical perspectives
on taken-for-granted aspects of mainstream culture. One
faculty respondent reflected, Neither myself nor my grad
school peers of color expected the extreme resistance for
paradigm changes . . . we have all been pushed out of these
colleges simply because of this resistance. Another, criti-
cizing a continuing adherence to colonial attitudes toward
Native Americans, wrote of archeologys
unwillingness to recognize that todays Native Americans are the
descendants of the people that archaeologists study. [It] absolves
the archaeologist of any responsibility for the often-damaging ef-
fects of his/her work in real-life issues of American Indian tribes.
Failure to understand or even acknowledge that anthropology
continues to be culpable in the colonizing of Indigenous peo-
ples perpetuates the racist image of anthropology to Indigenous
peoples. Failure to teach graduate students (at least) about the
history of the relationship between anthropology and minority
populations from minority perspectives is irresponsible.
Survey participants consistently reported that works by mi-
nority scholars and their roles in theory building are simply
not reflected in the canon or curriculum and explained that
this adds to a daily experience of exclusion from the intel-
lectual life of the discipline.
Explanatory boundary stories are about that which nat-
urally distinguishes anthropology from other university dis-
ciplines (Davalos 1998). They function thereby to define or
assure anthropology of an intellectual rationale and institu-
tional place. Such tellings of boundary-maintenance stories
have no space to consider respondents arguments that the
content of the boundaries is racially exclusionary. Rather,
the storys message is that such considerations are irrele-
vant, certainly not intended, and hardly racist. The sub-
texts, however, are quite racial: that boundary makers are
not responsible for the racially discriminatory outcomes of
their efforts and that racism is defined by intent but not by
outcome. These subtexts rest on binary thinkingboth in
separating intent from outcome and separating institutional
marking of anthropological turf from a range of other schol-
arly topics and theoretical perspectives. In contrast, respon-
dents employed multiple causes and consequences in their
explanations. Some noted that gatekeeping is often about
racial exclusion and theoretical and topical gate keeping.
Sometimes, it is both. The latter view opens a conversation
about racially disparate outcomes and theoretical perspec-
tives, while the former, admitting only one, race-avoidant
explanation, shuts it down. By doing so, racially exclusion-
ary practices are likely to remain an elephant in the middle
of theoretical and canonical debates.
A more competitive kind of binary thinking underlies
understandings about how racial marginalization relates to
other kinds of social marginalization. For example, one re-
spondent described white women leaders who recognized
racism but did not act to oppose it. They stand by and do
nothing or tell you to go back into the ring and get beat up
because that is what they did. In this story, the reported
speakers thought of sexism and racism as separate issues af-
fecting discrete groups of people. One subtext is that it is
not white womens responsibility to deal with racism. How-
ever, in also avoiding the obvious fact that not all women are
white, it draws the boundaries of responsibility for dealing
with sexism in ways that exclude women of color.
Several respondents also had constantly to grapple with
the affirmative action stigma that they were not as good as
whites, who believed only they had made it on merit and
that affirmative action promoted people of color without
regard for merit. The subtext of this stigma combines
Bonilla Silvas story that because discrimination is a thing
of the past, affirmative action is no longer needed, with
MacLeans zero-sum story that whites are victims of reverse
discrimination, which presumes whites superior merit.
Anthropologists know full well that everyone has a com-
plex mix of positions in social hierarchies, among which
class, gender, and sexuality loom large. But in daily work-
place practice, we often think in mainstream binary ways.
For example, we may use an eitheror lens to separate mul-
tiple causes so as to evaluate the residual impact of race
rather than to explore how race interacts with other factors.
Or we may attribute racial disparities to class biaswhich is
perhaps seen as less offensive than race bias. In contrast, in-
tersectional thinking attends to what is shared as a window on
needed changes for improving multiple dimensions of inclu-
sivity in anthropology. We chose the latter approach, as did
many respondents. So, too, did the Commission on Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues in Anthropology (Leap

and Lewin 1999), which explained how socially structured
class, race, sexuality, and gender inequalities interact in
mutually reinforcing ways to ignore the circumstances of
a wide spectrum of anthropology students and faculty. In-
tersectional analysis requires rotating analytic perspectives,
among, for example, feminist, queer, and working-class
lenses to include the multiple and overlapping needs of an-
thropologists of color.
More than half of survey respondents are women of
color; hence, they experience both racial and gender bias.
They employed a feminist lens to explain how departmental
insensitivity to womens responsibilities for others affects
their work lives: scheduling of colloquia and social events,
for example, could exclude a disproportionate number of
students of color from valuable professional training and
community building because they have economic and fam-
ily responsibilities. As one respondent explained, [We] are
expected to deal with [childcare] on our own. We are also
expected to participate in department activities at the same
level as students who are single and do not have family obli-
gations. Even the best family-leave policies are restricted to
partners and children, but women of color are often also dis-
proportionately likely to be caring for siblings and parents.
Likewise queer students are often denied university benefits
for their spouses and children, and departments may not
recognize their forms of family (Leap and Lewin 1999).
One respondent argued that academic culture is based on
a norm of people without family responsibilities: childless
people put in so much time and effort that they produce
a speed up of the production line that is impossible for
parents to copy, so we look like slackers and dont get
promoted. Another implicated class bias: Tenure requires
having no life but [an] academic [one] and a class background
that gives you a level of financial support to work.
Class and race bias interact. Students of color are dis-
proportionately from working-class backgrounds, and insti-
tutional blindness to the concomitants of class works against
them. Because levels of financial support are seldom ade-
quate, students without family resources are disadvantaged.
Many have to take nonacademic jobs, which restricts study
time and participation in departmental social-professional
life. One respondent noted that this meant my serious-
ness was questioned. Working-class students also may not
have the same know how about the educational system as
students from more affluent backgrounds. A respondent ex-
plained: As a kid, I thought college was college[I was]
oblivious to the fact that a state university and an Ivy League
college were not equivalent for later professional success,
even though they might be equivalent in what students ac-
tually learned from them.
Class bias among academics negatively affects working-
class students of color. Respondents pointed out that na-
tional fellowships and intramural funding to support students
of color in practice support those from upper-middle-class
backgrounds. One suggested that national fellowships cre-
ate a prestige hierarchy and exclusive networks among the
Brodkin et al. Anthropology as White Public Space? 553
relatively privileged: Too often diversity dissolves into a
kind of multi-elitism that maintains class solidarity for the
privileged, who are often blind to academic strengths in
different class-based and racial packaging. It was also true
that the less polished and underfunded working-class stu-
dents of color succeeded less often than their middle-class
and funded counterparts, and faculty were so unfamiliar
with the other that they were very poor judges of ability
because they could only see ability that was manifested in
their own image.
Predominantly white departments are fertile environ-
ments for reproducing these kinds of race-avoidant thinking.
Arenas of unspoken agreement help constitute departments
as white conceptual spaces, as when white peers reinforce
one anothers interpretations of behavioral meanings, proper
anthropology, and responsibility for diversity. As one re-
spondent explained, peers may be
well-intentioned but ignorant. Then, ones community becomes
a forum, instead, for cultural debate and tensionmeaning that,
as the person of color, I have to educate more than I can engage in
discussion. More often than not, I have to walk on eggshells to get
the harsh reality across to (particularly) white people because they
are often the most sensitive to interrogating their own behaviors
in order to understand racial or privileged complicity.
Because students and faculty of color are so few and scat-
tered, many respondents were the only person of color in
very white departments and felt conspicuous. Almost half
of the respondents who received their Ph.D.s before 1981
described feeling out of place. Sometimes it was because of
their scholarly interests, as when one respondent reported,
I was the only student in my department interested in work
on race and that was often a lonely place. Sometimes uncon-
scious social interaction patterns marked the space as white:
Any department or, for that matter, campus gathering in-
evitably ends up with black students standing alone while
others chat on diffidently and obliviously. Gesture, language,
aesthetic, all employed to include and exclude, as one who
was surveyed indicated. Native American respondents de-
scriptions are the bleakest: they report the highest rates of
social isolation, unsupportive faculty, bad mentoring, and
chilly university climates, together with heavy family and
personal responsibilities.
In sum, professional training and support systems as
well as lifelong scholarly networks begin in graduate school.
Ones cohort and mentor are the starting points for building
such ties. Social marginalization, especially around ones re-
search interest, is more than a psychological barrier (although
it is that too). It slows the process of forming the kinds of pro-
fessional peer groups that underlie ones academic success:
access to critical readers of drafts and invitations to present
and to participate in symposia and other venues bringing
together those with similar interests. Doing ones work in
isolation means few or no opportunities to see its mean-
ing and significance reflected back through participation in
a community of scholars. These are the professional conse-
quences of racially divided academic labor, a white-centered
554 American Anthropologist Vol. 113, No. 4 December 2011
canon, and white-reinforced interpretations of behavior and
meaning. These are some of the practices that constitute
anthropology departments as white-owned public spaces.
To undo such self-reinforcing racial practices, anthro-
pology needs to become more diverse and self-conscious
than it is. Departments seeking to be supportive of stu-
dents and faculty of color need to be conscious of class- and
gender-associated social and financial responsibilities as well
as different levels of class-associated academic know-how;
furthermore, departments should be ready to restructure
professional training and social life in ways that do not ex-
clude. By so doing, they will also be creating supportive
environments for white working-class and women students.
One respondent summed up the advantages of thinking with
intersectional perspectives:
A family-friendly, inclusive faculty environment is an aspect of
support that I have really come to appreciate. Not only in the
sense of gathering informally as a community for social occasions
but also a climate in which the professional practices of the office
are flexible and considerate of the need to spend time with family
or accomplishing family-related activities. Also, a professional
climate that recognizes and supports diverse kinds of family and
gender roles within families.
CONCLUSIONS
Anthropology has made modest progress in racially diver-
sifying its faculties and Ph.D. cohorts since the late 1970s.
Graduate students of color are finding good mentors and
more funding, at least to the extent that it is available. Still,
the sharp rise of faculty of color in the 1980s seems to have
stagnated in the 1990s. And there are signs of a revolv-
ing door for a limited number of minority faculty positions
within anthropology departments.
Incremental changes are not enough. From the outset,
anthropology has had two specific goals in racial diversity
efforts: to diversify the practitioners racially and to diversify
the perspectives from which its theory comes. Both goals
together would racially diversify the ownership of anthro-
pology and make its departments multiracial public spaces.
However, neither has happened.
Instead, the organizational nature of all-too-many an-
thropology departments is as white public spaces. By this, we
mean a hegemonic, daily, unreflexive praxis that marginal-
izes faculty and students of color. We have argued that it
does so organizationally by dividing faculty labor and respon-
sibility along racial lines, such that faculty of color are held
responsible for diversity duty while their white colleagues
are encouraged to develop their own research. Racial di-
visions persist in graduate training, at least in sociocultural
anthropology, separating students into two race-based and
professionally unequal tracks. A key lesson for overcom-
ing organizational segregation is that departments must hold
white faculty equally responsible for improving racial di-
versity for it to be highly valued. As one respondent wrote,
Faculty as a whole have to discuss the stance they plan to take
on minority student recruitment and retention. One or two
minority faculty members cannot change a negative climate
perpetrated by the majority. Respondents also suggested
that cluster hiringbringing in a critical mass of faculty and
graduate students of coloris the single most important
practice for creating the safe and welcoming climate needed
to change the status quo.
Many departments remain attitudinally white in owner-
ship and decision making about the discipline, undermining
what Daryl Smith (2009) calls institutional mattering and
belonging. This happens through the continuing pattern of
marginalizing the work and theoretical perspectives gener-
ated by scholars of color, as well as by seeing proper an-
thropology and ethnic studies as mutually exclusive. Both
practices constitute anthropologists of color as less than
full anthropologists. White ownership also happens when
a predominantly white department collectively enacts main-
stream U.S. forms of race avoidance in dealing with racial
issues in departmental practice. As one respondent put it,
Simple awareness that department culture is not race neu-
tral would go a long way in breaking down the barriers that
discourage anthropologists of color. Binary thinking and
race-avoidant discourse around disciplinary boundary main-
tenance index racially unequal ownership of the discipline
and rationalize racially unequal divisions of labor. Studies
of gender used to be treated as not real anthropology, and
studies of homosexuality are still treated as this way (Leap
and Lewin 1999) so that anthropologys intellectual public
space can also be considered not only white but also male
and straight.
Perhaps the biggest attitudinal barrier to ethnic diversi-
fication is a belief that being an anthropologist inoculates one
against racism (as well as other varieties of social stereotyp-
ing). Many respondents urged developing a departmental
discourse about race that includes reflexivity. Intersectional
thinking is at the heart of reflexivity: for example, recogniz-
ing that not all minorities are male (or straight or working
class) nor are all women white (or straight or middle class)
opens up possibilities for making racial diversity the cutting
edge of broader diversification. The lesson is to make critical
discourses part of departmental discourse.
Change of the magnitude necessary to ensure that an-
thropology is a fully inclusive profession racially will also
require actions by the AAA. The APA has successfully em-
ployed a robust mix of efforts that have produced a decade
of significant growth of minority Ph.D.s, practitioners, and
greater involvement of psychologists of color in APA gov-
ernance. The APA has established an Office of Ethnic Mi-
nority Affairs that offers fellowships, mentoring programs,
training programs, and materials for and about students and
faculty of color in the field and the needs of communities
of color. Among these are a leadership and mentoring pro-
gram for honors community college students of color; a
multi-institutional recruitment, retention, and training pro-
gram supporting students of color interested in biomedical
research in psychology; an initiative that promotes inter-
est in, visibility of, and concern about psychology in ethnic
 Brodkin et al.
minorityserving institutions; and a standing committee that
empowers and supports the mission of a multicultural psy-
chology (APA n.d.).
The AAA needs to do far more of this than it does. We
recommend three relatively simple steps. First, far more
intensive and systematic data collection by the AAA is crit-
ical. The second goal should be making visible the valuable
reports that are already on the AAA website but are almost
impossible to findsuch as those concerning how racial mi-
norities, women, and queer anthropologists all experience
the discipline. Anthropologys interest in diversity needs to
be obvious on its website, either grouping pertinent data
there or with prominent links. Third, the AAA needs a
staff person whose sole job is promoting diversity. The re-
sponsibilities of this staff member would include aggressive
dissemination of pertinent data both within the field and in
venues that will reach prospective students; expanded, coor-
dinated pipeline programs; increased, targeted support for
the research of graduate students and faculty of color; and
support for departments to more effectively assess and im-
prove institutional climate. The point is that success requires
multiple strategies and long-term commitmentsand staff
responsible for them.
Finally, the heart of our conclusion is embarrassingly
obvious. It is this: the defamiliarizing insights and analyses
generated from vantage points developed by anthropologists
of color are better tools for diversifying departmental orga-
nization and culture (among other things) than hegemonic
ones, and anthropology departments should embrace them
instead of marginalizing them. Alternatively put, anthropol-
ogy has made its mark on understanding cultures by taking
seriously the points of view of those it studies. We suggest
it needs to take seriously the points of view of those who
are internal others to better understand and diversify itself
as well as enhance its theoretical robustness.
Karen Brodkin Department of Anthropology, University of
California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 900951553; kbrodkin@
anthro.ucla.edu
Sandra Morgen Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon,
Eugene, OR 97403; smorgen@uoregon.edu
Janis Hutchinson Department of Anthropology, University of Hous-
ton, Houston, TX 77204; jhutchinson@uh.edu
NOTES
Acknowledgments. We wish to thank Carollee Howes for quan-
titative data analysis and Carole Browner, Agustin Fuentes, Carollee
Howes, Bill Leap, Tom Patterson, two anonymous reviewers, and not
least Tom Boellstorff for their very valuable critiques and suggestions.
1. AAA publications include the following: Harrison 1997; Leap
and Lewin 1999; Morgen 1989; Smedley 1998.
2. Many respondents omitted some data about their background.
Because the numbers of ethnic minority anthropologists are
Anthropology as White Public Space? 555
small, respondents could have been identifiable from their
answers. We believe that omitting some data may be ways
to retain anonymity, a concern expressed by a number of re-
spondents.
3. Surveys in the late 1990s show that 56 percent of the 400
Ph.D.s a year and 58.5 percent of about 490 Ph.D.s a year
between 2000 and 2009 have been awarded to women (Rudd
et al. 2008:3; NSF n.d.).
4. Not all respondents answered year of Ph.D. and school.
5. The main sources of data about the numbers of minority Ph.D.s
and faculty are NSFs WebCASPAR database for doctorates
and the three AAA surveys of departments. The latter, al-
though detailed, are limited in that departmental participation
is voluntary and not all departments respond.
6. The following websites describe in some detail the efforts
undertaken by political science, sociology, and economics and
offer some quantitative data on the numbers of students and
faculty of color in these disciplines: http://www.apsanet.org/
content_6832.cfm, http://www.asanet.org/galleries/Re-
search/ASAMembership_2007%20Final.pdf, http://www.
vanderbilt.edu/AEA/CSMGEP/index.html.
7. For study of rates of minority participation in selected social
sciences, see http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/CSMGEP/
statistics/.
8. The full report is available at http://www.apa.org/monitor/
nov07/ceo.html.
9. Respondents were asked to check all items they had experienced
(no support for research travel, heavy course loads, no support
for tenure, no release time for research, poor compensation,
heavy student advising, heavy service loads, no stopping the
clock for family responsibilities, no research assistance).
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FOR FURTHER READING
(These selections were made by the American Anthropologist editorial
interns as examples of research related in some way to this article. They do
not necessarily reflect the views of the authors.)
Akom, A. A.
2008 Black Metropolis and Mental Life: Beyond the Burden
of Acting White: Toward a Third Wave of Critical Racial
Studies. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39(3):247
265.
Baba, Marietta L., and Carole E. Hill
2006 Whats in the Name Applied Anthropology? An Encounter
with Global Practice. National Association for the Practice of
Anthropology Bulletin 25(1):176207.
Bunzl, Matti
2004 Boas, Foucault, and the Native Anthropologist: Notes to-
ward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist
106(3):435442.
Deyhle, Donna
2007 Beatrice Medicine and the Anthropology of Education:
Legacy and Vision for Critical Race/Critical Language Re-
search and Praxis. Anthropology and Education Quarterly
38(3):209220.
Foley, Douglas
2010 The Rise of Class Culture Theory in Educational Anthro-
pology. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 41(3):215
227.
Gravlee, Clarence C., and Elizabeth Sweet
2008 Race, Ethnicity, and Racism in Medical Anthropology,
19772002. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22(1):2751.
Kaszycka, Katarzyna A., Goran Strkalj, and Jan Strzako
2009 Current Views of European Anthropologists on Race: In-
fluence of Educational and Ideological Background. American
Anthropologist 111(1):4356.