Lee D. Baker

Racism in professional settings : forms of address as clues to power relations

Since the Reagan administration, commitments to affirmative action programs have waned precipitously, inner cities have been decimated, high-paying manufacturing jobs have been replaced by high-tech service sector jobs, and a burgeoning Black middle class has developed; yet racial inequality persists. Although great strides have been made, people of color still confront racism in various arenas. One of the most difficult areas in which to identify subtle but pernicious forms of racism is professional office settings. This article explores how power relations are signified by subtle cultural rules. Specifically, it demonstrates how the cultural rules used by co-workers to address each other emerge as a way of articulating interethnic power relations in office settings. The research concludes that even the best efforts to diversify the workforce of an organization often perpetuate racial inequality because members of various ethnic groups are still under-represented in the top management positions.

Franz Boas Out of the Ivory Tower

Although the idea that Franz Boas was a public intellectual is widely embraced, there is nothing written that specifically addresses the way he initially got pushed, pulled, or better yet, dragged into the public debates on race, racism, nationalism, and war – the issues for which he used anthropology in public arenas. In this article, I seek to accomplish three tasks: first, to highlight how Franz Boas and his work got pulled into the public arena; second, to assess the impact of Boas’ work as a public intellectual; and finally, to discuss the ways Boas’ writing and research a century ago is being deployed, appropriated, and used in today’s public arenas.

Columbia University's Franz Boas: He Led the Undoing of Scientific Racism.

Editors Note: Two hundred fifty years ago scholars in the West divided mankind into two categories. On the one hand there was the black man who was said to be subhuman and of lower intelligence and therefore a natural slave. Then there was the white man who uniquely possessed the glorious traits of Newton and Milton. Here is the story of Franz Boas, the Columbia University sociologist who was largely responsible for destroying the academic consensus that blacks were a lower order of humanity.

Voicing the ancestors: Readings in memory of George Stocking

In this Forum, four anthropologists have chosen an “ancestral” figure to give voice to. Anthropologists’ ancestors are generally teachers, mentors, or, less proximally, canonized scholars of prior generations. Anthropologists draw on their ancestors for theoretical wisdom and practical guidance. Yet ancestors are not always shared broadly across our discipline, and they can easily fall into oblivion. Giving voice to them, publicly, allows each contributor to comment on an important scholar and invites readers to renew their acquaintance with disciplinary ghosts who still have much to teach us.

Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954: An Intellectual History by Stephanie Y. Evans

Edited by Layli D. Phillips NewYork: Routledge (2006) ISBN10: 0415954118. 437 pp., Cloth,

The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities.

100.00; Paper,

From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race

39.95 Every year, the National Urban League (NUL) issues a compendium of essays, facts, and statistics that make up its signature report, ‘‘The State of Black America.’’ For the report, popular among journalists, grant writers, and policy wonks, the editors choose an annual theme and invite influential scholars and popular public officials to write essays to help contextualize and interpret the dry and rather abstruse graphs, charts, and figures documenting home ownership, workforce participation, infant mortality, educational attainment. The wide range of indexes form a matrix used to determine its mega-index—the NUL’s trademarked ‘‘Equality Index.’’ This index of indexes reduces the entire state of Black America to a raw number, where ‘‘an index number of less than one means that blacks are doing relatively worse than whites,’’ and for 2007, that number was 0.73 (NUL, State of Black America 2007:17). The report is arbitrary, essentialist, homogenizing, and explicitly reductionist, but it’s a sincere and informative way to document change over time and remind all Americans that racism exists and discrimination persists. For 2007, the theme was ‘‘Portrait of the Black Male,’’ and Barack Obama wrote the foreword and recounted some of the high points of the year, but focused on the continued vulnerability of Black people in general and Black men in

From savage to Negro : anthropology and the construction of race, 1896-1954

Prologue: The Revolution Remembered: The Fifth of March, 1858 - PART 1: FASHIONING A MORAL COMMUNITY, 1775-1800 - In the Bowels of a Free and Christian Country, Living in the Revolutionary Era - Sons and Daughters of Distress: A Theology of Liberation - PART 2: ENVIRONMENTS OF MEMORY, 1800-1835 - From Laws and Revolutions, Freedom Lieux - Africa Envisioned, Africa Found - Moral Community, Ethnic Identity, and Political Action - PART 3: HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY, 1835-1860 - Haiti, Canada, and a Pan-African Vision - Biography, Narrative, and Memory: The Construction of a Popular Historical Consciousness - Epilogue: Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Empire-Building