Remembering Leith

Leith Mullings and I were close colleagues and friends. Her work was insightful, substantial, progressive, and always humane. But when I remember Leith, I reflect on being privileged with sisterhood, beyond collegiality. She was a compa~ nera of a special kind whose relationships were nurtured for many years in the halls of a broad activist academy, in the society of activist scholars, as an alternative, if interacting, universe occupying the same space and time as meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). So I ask: How wonderful is that, to know a woman in the warmest way of shared ideas within the colder space of anthropology? I want to add these reminiscences of my sister to her lasting record. I met Leith as an expert on women’s health in Ghana, on medical anthropology there and in New York City, on racism and its pale multicultural shadow, and on the confluence of racism, sexism, and class with her late husband, Manning Marable. She was an advocate of public engagement as an extension of the long lineage of African diasporic activist scholarship she knew so well. Leith has left a body of literature to be explored, unpacked, and examined for future use. But the fact is, for Leith and me, such work was no more or less than the boat we sailed together as intellectually affective human beings. Leith and I were platonic lovers in the best and classic sense, sharing a deep affection for our common intellectual passions, aspirations for humanity, and an abiding respect for each other. We often each helped complete the other’s agenda. Our association was anthropology. While she and I had many other lives, our lives together were lived there. That is the story I will tell. How she entered the same space in which I and our compatriots were also situated to enjoy friendship and a common mission, is perhaps to arrive at the “conjuncture” or “concurrent configuration” of preceding events that Stuart Hall discussed at the University of the West Indies in 2004. He resolved Marx’s contradictory conclusion that history is determining, by adding that there are moments of “contingency” by which individuals and groups choose what they will do with the history they are given. That is what Leith, Manning, Johnnetta, Faye, A. Lynn, Ted, Sheila, Carlos, Lesley, Yolanda, Lee, Angela, Roger, Alaka, Steve, Irma, Pem, and so many others of the Decolonizing Generation (Allen and Jobson 2016) pondered with purpose. What, as anthropologists, can we do at our personal conjunctures to expose and remove the veil over the intersecting oppressions of our daily lives and those of our loved ones? Immediate among our concerns is anthropology’s complicit role (William Willis Jr.’s “skeletons in the anthropological closet” [1972] or Kathleen Gough’s “child of imperialism” [1968]) in the construction of that veil. Leith Mullings was great among these activist scholars, always finding “good trouble,” as the man said, and plenty of it. Her life was so much bigger than anthropology, and yet, knowing the lure of the anthropological lens as we do, she might have become habituated to its gaze, even upon herself. It was not anyone’s anthropological lens. Leith was born in an island nation I knew well (my family expatriated from DC to Port Antonio in 1971), in a cool highland central Jamaican middle-class community, Mandeville, I visited only once. She would grow up in the City of New York, where she landed as a young child. Perhaps our families were ships passing. Leith, a New Yorker for sure, did not have the problem of missing racism cues that West Indians sometimes have—a sacrifice for the confidence a majority upbringing can nurture. I guess she was on the cusp, as immigrant families often are, with high parental expectations of a life lived, nonetheless, as a “minority.” She would eventually spend her life exposing manifestations of racism in order to help others, just as she had initially dedicated her life to helping one patient at a time. She found her way through Queens College and Cornell’s School of Nursing, to a PhD in anthropology at