How To Support Blacademics & Be an Ally

If you are working in academia, this post is for you.

Ellie Adekur has created this important resource on How To Support Blacademics: For Non-Black Faculty and Grad Students Teaching Black Faces in White Spaces.

Adekur is a is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Toronto, as well as human rights activist and social justice educator. This resource was posted today on Adekur's Facebook page in response to the latest instances of anti-Black violence witnessed across North America this week, and the need to address "anti-Black racism in classes, tutorials and office hours: professors and teaching assistants screening violent content, leaning on racist tropes, ignoring anti-Black comments, or singling out Black students to address problematic comments/opinions in the room."

This resource is not exhaustive, but it is a useful and important place for instructors to start rethinking their engagements in and outside of the classroom in relation to racism and social injustice. It contains simple, invaluable points or reminders about how to support our colleagues, students, and others in the university. As social scientists, especially as anthropologists, we already know these things intellectually, but for non-Black academics remember:

3. If you're not Black or racialized, don't pretend to be an expert. Don’t pretend to have all of the answers, or feel like you need to. Your empathy and allyship are constantly practiced, learned and always developing. 

You may also wish to check out this page of Links for Allies from White Ribbon.

UPDATE - 10 July 2016: Jennifer has also pointed out this article, "11 Common Ways White Folks Avoid Taking Responsibility for Racism in the US" (2016, Everyday Feminism), written by Robin DiAngelo. As a white educator who focuses on critical multicultural and social justice education, DiAngelo draws on her own observations as a white person facilitating anti-racism workshops with white Americans, and the outrage she frequently meets in trying to engage them in discussions of racism as systemic. Part of learning to engage as an ally requires that people with privilege (here, those who identify/ are identified as white) be willing to hear feedback on how their actions contribute to systemic violence. This might be a useful piece for students to reflect on in the classroom, perhaps as an exercise leading to a discussion about contemporary race and racism.

Quick links:

• Ellie Adekur's How To Support Blacademics: For Non-Black Faculty and Grad Students Teaching Black Faces in White Spaces (2016)
• Links for Allies from White Ribbon
• 11 Common Ways White Folks Avoid Taking Responsibility for Racism in the US (2016, Everyday Feminism)
• Via Facebook, MTV's Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey debunks 4 big myths about the #BlackLivesMatter movement that many students have probably encountered in just 4 minutes. (This easy, accessible piece also references law professor Patricia Leary's response to her students' complaints about her wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt earlier this year.)

Why aren't millennials buying diamonds?

link to original tweet @TheEconomist

Earlier this week, The Economist magazine asked the Twittersphere a question: Why aren't millennials buying diamonds?

Unsurprisingly, this question generated a lot of (angry) feedback.

If you actually follow the links to the different articles that The Economist has published, it becomes clear that the authors have a few answers to why "the diamond industry is being upended," as a later tweet explained. In one link, the threat to the diamond industry comes from the production of new synthetic and conflict-free diamonds. According to a similar story,

In 2003 the diamond industry responded to concerns that sales of illicit stones were being used to finance warfare in Africa by launching the Kimberley Process certification scheme. This was designed to make diamonds traceable, but focuses only on the ones that pay for rebel armies. Man-made diamonds spare millennials and others the headache of worrying that they are supporting human-rights abuses under repressive regimes such as Zimbabwe’s. Adding Hollywood glamour to the moral appeal is Leonardo DiCaprio, an investor in a synthetic-diamonds startup.

Yes, ethical consumption practices do play an important role in why millennials aren't buying diamonds. But, to think that ethical consumerism (and the new choice to purchase ethical synthetic stones) is the only reason, certainly does not provide a holistic answer. It also completely bypasses the question of 'value' that anthropologist Andrew Walsh has written about in relation to 'authentic' versus 'synthetic' sapphires...

What is interesting is that neither of The Economist's stories pick up on the threads that irate millennial tweeters rightly drew into the conversation. Such threads are picked up by an article for The Daily Beast (Lacking Sparkle: Why Have Millennials Fallen Out of Love With Diamonds?): Russell Shor, senior industry analyst at the Gemological Institute of America, said that the decline of diamond sales in the US

"is because of the different priorities of twentysomethings. “People in the millennial generation need to save more. If you’re a young person trying to buy a house in this market where housing prices have risen and wages still haven’t caught up, obviously you aren’t thinking about buying really expensive diamonds.”"

In the classroom, posing The Economist's question: "why aren't millennials buying diamonds?" might be a useful discussion question to open broader conversation about a number of important topics, such as: ethical consumerism, the idea of authenticity and value, or how the relative poverty of millennials compared to their parents is actually part of the same global economic system that has lead to the production of conflict diamonds.

Quick links and further reading:

• The Economist: Shine On (2016); In the Rough (2016)
• The Economist's provocative tweet and responses (via Twitter)
• Lacking Sparkle: Why Have Millennials Fallen Out of Love With Diamonds? (2016, The Daily Beast)
• Anthropologist Andrew Walsh's website and Academia.edu pages. Recommended reading: 
• 2010  The Commoditization of Fetishes: Telling the Difference between Natural and Synthetic Sapphires.  American Ethnologist, 37(1): 97-113.
• 2012  Made in Madagascar: Sapphires, Ecotourism, and the Global Bazaar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Anthropology & Public Policy

One of the motivations for starting anthro everywhere! was to create a page where teachers and students (and skeptical relatives) alike could get a better idea of the wide range of things that you can do with anthropology or what an anthropological perspective can bring to a workplace. If you check out our page, "Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university" or our tag 'what can anthro do?' you can see how anthropologists are bringing their critical cultural perspective and ethnographic methodological approach to a wide variety of fields, including:

• Media: Journalism, Writing, Entertainment
• Marketing/ Brand & Product Development
• Health Professions
• Technology
• Finance
• Entrepreneurship

While there seems to be a lot of easily accessible material on the internet about the value of an anthropological lens in, say, the marketing or health sectors, I had a hard time finding any similar publications on what an anthropological perspective can bring to work in the fields of public policy or public service. Of course, these too are fields where anthropologists not only work, but excel. 

In order to address this issue, I recently went to Ottawa where I interviewed three public servants currently working for Canada's federal department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs who have backgrounds in anthropology. While this piece isn't ready for publication just yet, I luckily came across another interesting perspective on an anthropological or ethnographic perspective in a recent post from EPIC: Advancing the Value of Ethnography in Industry.

In "Human-Centered Research in Policymaking" (20 June, 2016 - part of the Data|Design|Civics Series) Chelsea Mauldin and Natalia Radywyl discuss how they were involved in a project to "use ethnographic research to develop the New York City Digital Playbook, a policy and operational guide to help City staff develop new and improved digital services for New Yorkers." Their work in this project will help advise on how to create digital services that will actually be used by those who need them, including vulnerable New Yorkers who might already have difficulty accessing city services, and who are not seen as the typical 'user' of digital technology. In spite of the innovative results promised should the City incorporate their findings, Mauldin and Radywyl write that the adoption of an ethnographic + design approach in policy making is still new.

Our work is part of a broad human-centered shift in policymaking. However, design and ethnographic work is happening primarily in the arena of operational policy – the strategic direction and day-to-day practices that inform how members of the public interact with government. Less enlightened are the “upstream” phases of policymaking that constrain operational policy. These are legislative policy, laws enacted by elected legislative bodies, and regulatory policy, the arena in which civil servants interpret how a given piece of legislation should be acted upon by operational components of government.

Hopefully, we will be able to provide more links to accessible, open-access writing about the connections between anthropology and public policy/ public service very soon! If you have come across this kind of work, write on it, or do it yourself, we would love to hear from you (anthrolens at gmail.com).

Quick links and further reading:

•  Applying an anthropological perspective outside of university (anthro everywhere! *now* with links to Public Policy & Public Service)
• Human-Centered Research in Policymaking (2016, EPIC)
• links to other articles in EPIC's Data|Design|Civics Series