Can Anthropology Get Free?

Abstract

aesthetic tastes. . . . However, the number of AfroAmericans securing doctorates (was, and is) . . . drastically limited by the difficulty of gaining access to graduate training and adequate financing” (1978, 86). Commenting that for these reasons the “time” had not been “ripe” for a critical mass in the pioneering period—“nor is it yet, apparently,” he writes in 1990 —he says, presciently, that “the Black Studies thrust” will attract more to anthropology (Drake and Baber 1990, 2). Professor Drake confronts the fact that the business of rectifying the record—“corrective” as Manning Marable (2000) named the second of his tripartite characteristics of the Black intellectual tradition (among “descriptive” and “prescriptive”) —has been fraught. Black feminist critiques of this “bias” have already incisively revealed this (see Carby 1998; Christian 1989; James 1997). In this essay, he shows, for example, Dr. Delany’s editorializing and glossing over historical facts. Still, this reader—as an ethnographer, and a critic—is thoroughly convinced by Professor Drake that “the point of view of a committed Black observer was valuable . . . as an offset to the malicious disported views of anti-Black travelers and missionaries . . . I am doubtful whether even a trained ethnographer . . . could have been ‘objective’ given the social context of slavery . . . . What passed for anthropology was . . . explicitly racist and pro-slavery” (Drake and Baber 1990, 3–4). What do we do with this? What is required, now, in our reading practices and in our seeing and saying as scholars, teachers, and writers? It seems to call for a “needed . . . counter-ideology” to the true ideological character of “what we have heretofore called ‘objective’ . . . intellectual activities (that) were actually white studies in perspective and content” (Drake 1969, 5–6, cited in Marable 2000). One that can correct the record holistically, multivocally, and intersectionally—eschewing not only the white gaze but also interrogating classism, heterosexism, and sexism within the enclosure of Blackademe, in our own sweet spot in the cut—the anthropology of Black experience.