Special Section Article

FAY E V. H A R R I S O N

Making the ambiguities, absent

presences and contradictions of
racialisation analytically legible:
reflections on a critical intellectual
imperative

Markus Balkenhol and Katharina Schramm are to be commended for coordinating and
conceptually framing this special section, a most timely contribution to recent trends
in the anthropology of race and ethnicity. Conversations on this important concern
are being held in many parts of the world, not uncommonly within volatile climates
and under embattled circumstances. I was introduced to the Anthropology of Race
and Ethnicity (ARE) Network when I attended the European Association of Social
Anthropologists’ (EASA) 2016 biennial meeting in Milan, Italy. I appreciated the sig-
nificance and indeed the urgency of establishing a supportive, publicly engaged space
for anthropologists in Europe and their kindred thinking colleagues elsewhere who
share with them interests in race and ethnicity, racialisation and racism, xenophobia,
Islamophobia and many related matters reflecting how race and ethnicity intermesh
with each other and with other mutually constitutive axes of difference and inequal-
ity salient in various situations and contexts. The dynamic ebbs and flows along with
the ambiguities and shifting terms of race‐making – an assemblage of social relations,
encounters and practices situated in and across time and space – make the tools, lenses
and ethics of sociocultural anthropology’s ethnographic inquiry particularly useful.
About a year after Milan, I participated in a fairly prestigious interdisciplinary
conference where I observed very different circumstances and commitments. I encoun-
tered a number of social scientists who insisted that the language of race was not appro-
priate for our work group’s drafting of the conference’s statement on the social and
political challenges faced in many parts of the world today. An anthropologist from
France was perhaps the most vociferous critic of the use of the race concept. The per-
spective he espoused in that discussion seemed to follow the colour‐blind, race‐evasive
and post‐racial line of thought that exists in parts of Europe as well as in the United
States and Latin America. Contributors to this publication attest to this social fact as
it is manifested in different national contexts. However, in all those settings, there are
also countervailing forces, such as the socio‐political confluences that have given rise
to inclusive projects promoting ‘Europeanisation from below’, as Marleen de Witte
points out in her contribution here.

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doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12720
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Interrogating racism, its denials and culprits

The socio‐political situation in France has been critically interrogated by scholars such
as Norman Ajari (2019), Trica Danielle Keaton (2013) and Didier Fassin (2013), whose
analyses all diverge from the point of view expressed in the work group. Fassin’s eth-
nography examines urban unrest in the outer‐city banlieues of Paris, where working‐
class and working‐poor residents, largely North and sub‐Saharan Africans as well as
Roma, most of them immigrants, are concentrated. The story he tells interrogates the
expanded powers of policing in the wake of a state of emergency. Police practices that
never would have been implemented in localities of affirmed national belonging have,
in my view, clear racialising effects, produced by interactions and encounters in con-
flict‐laden settings of social control where the dominant discursive practices conjure
claims of racelessness.
In their distinct yet complementary ways, Ajari and Keaton address how pub-
lic recognition of racism, anti‐racist activism and opposition to a resilient colonial-
ism (Nyamnjoh 2016) that contours the French cultural and political landscape have
been censored, delegitimated and, in some instances, even criminalised, putting the
reputations, freedom and very lives of activists in jeopardy. This utter hostility toward
race‐cognisant discourse and political action goes beyond any sense of discomfort
comparable to what Sinan Çankaya and Paul Mepschen observe among white mid-
dle‐class liberals in the Netherlands. The authors examine the normative, unmarked
whiteness of individuals blinded to the tacit racism within their own ranks. Çankaya
and Mepschen demonstrate how middle‐class actors tend to displace racism onto the
periphery of their comfort zone by attributing culpability to less class‐privileged,
extremist and stigmatised segments of the white Dutch population.
Likewise, in the United States, many people and perhaps much of ‘middle
America’ believe that the legislative and policy reforms that the Civil Rights Movement
prompted solved the race problem way back in the 1960s. They associate remnants of
past racism with only the most extreme manifestations of hate, whether toward ‘invad-
ing’ immigrants or non‐immigrant minorities. The most heinous actions are assumed
to represent aberrations from a non‐racist norm. In their view, racism occurs only
on the fringes of sociocultural and political life and is credited to lower‐class whites,
members of downwardly mobile sectors of the deindustrialised working class, whose
anxieties and ignorance supposedly lead them to deviate from the norms of respectabil-
ity and tenets of egalitarianism in democratic society. This tendency not to see racism
across a broad cross‐section of US society – implicating even middle‐class persons who
characterise themselves as non‐racist or as anti‐racist progressives – clearly resonates
with what Çankaya and Mepschen’s article describes.
Also controversial in the United States, but from the perspective of racially sub-
jected people, are accusations of ‘reverse racism’ made against them for expressing
grievances about continued racial discrimination and for their achievements, which
are too often seen as unearned due to widespread beliefs concerning racial minorities’
innate cognitive deficiencies and laziness. If we accept that racism is more than prej-
udice or bigotry, of which anyone could potentially be guilty, reverse racism is a con-
tradiction in terms. This is so because of the enduring and indeed widening structural
disparities and vulnerabilities which constrain racial subordinates’ capacity to harness
and exercise structural power (Wolf 1990: 587), a necessary but insufficient condition
for perpetrating oppression as well as for creating some of the conditions for effecting

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and sustaining the outcomes of fundamental social change. According to commonsen-

sical assumptions articulated by both working and middle‐class individuals, reverse
racism targets and oppresses white people, particularly white men, who feel categori-
cally disadvantaged and discriminated against because of affirmative action and prefer-
ential treatment policies enacted in the workplace and in admissions to post‐secondary
education along with post‐graduate and professional training programmes. According
to these claims, the undeserving advancements that racially minoritised workers and
professionals make in employment, education and also in mobilising for political rep-
resentation deprive whites of what many of them believe is rightfully theirs. This sense
of entitlement exists in a country whose very formation was based on white settler
colonialism (a predicament that still exists today as an element of what Aníbal Quijano
[2000a, 2000b] terms the ‘coloniality of power’), the slaughter and territorial dispos-
session of Indigenous peoples and the abduction and enslavement of sub‐Saharan
Africans.
Of course, sentiments and practices like these are not at all restricted to the United
States. The intensification of backlash against public policies and related programmes
for social inclusion and equity, which have only begun to make inroads in redressing
the historical exclusion of underrepresented segments of Brazil’s population, particu-
larly Indigenous people and Afro‐Brazilians, is now being explicitly authorised under
the current presidential regime. In the specific context of higher education and training
in the social sciences, drastic cutbacks in government‐sponsored scholarships which
have benefited students – including students studying anthropology – from impover-
ished and racially subordinated backgrounds will deeply affect who will be included
in the next generation of anthropologists. Many Brazilian anthropologists and other
intellectuals, particularly the small minority of subaltern positionalities, are seriously
questioning whether the professoriate along with non‐academic sectors in which social
scientists apply their knowledge, skills and methodological tools will reflect Brazil’s
heterogeneous society or persist in being overwhelmingly white and/or whitened in
terms of demographic profiles, epistemological orientations, and priorities for research
and knowledge production.
The refusal to acknowledge and genuinely tackle everyday mundane forms of rac-
ism, both the overt and covert varieties, interpersonal micro‐aggressions (Sue 2010) as
well as institutionally sedimented meso‐ and macro‐aggressions, across the entire class
spectrum works against the kinds of meaningful and constructive public discussions
and policy interventions that are urgently needed. Without clarifying the intricacies,
subtleties and scope of how race is made and remade, and how racism is constituted
and practised, its structural embeddedness in even the most sacred domains of society,
the severity of its injurious effects and its broad continuum of intended and unintended
culpability, how is our collective recovery from the problems and violations of racism
possible?

Facing the multi-dimensional injuries of racism

Anthropologists and other social scientists who reject race as a concept and social cate-
gory worthy of systematic inquiry, analysis and theorisation commonly claim that race
does not really exist biologically; therefore, it is a mere fiction in society. Since biolog-
ical determinists were wrong, scientists and social scientists should jettison the concept

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and language of race to opt for frameworks focused on ethnicity and cultural conflicts
instead. This ‘no‐race’ point of view is often accompanied by inattention to racisms,
the varieties of actually lived oppression sustained by the materiality of discursive
practices, social relations and power dynamics. Regardless of whether the language
of alterity has an explicit code denoting race and races, racism can exist and perform
its labour in dehumanising ways (Harrison 2019; Mullings 2005). There are tacit ways
of encoding and indexing race in contexts where racism exists without the acknowl-
edgement or sustained visible presence of race and admitted racial identities. Careful
analyses of codes and shifting discursive registers can be useful in making invisibilised
and absent present racial negotiations and positionalities more analytically legible, par-
ticularly in unmarked, interstitial contexts, including those that Elena Calvo‐Gonzalez
perceptively examines in her article.
Among the problems implicating structural racism (which certainly include but
encompass more than attitudes of bigotry) are health disparities induced by the embod-
iment, sometimes with epigenetic consequences, of racism’s stresses. In other words,
racism can make people seriously sick and is a significant factor in (re)producing major
health disparities and related social suffering (Gravlee 2009). It therefore has effects on
human biological processes (Goodman et al. 2012). Critical biocultural anthropolo-
gists (among them critical medical anthropologists) have shed important light on these
processes, which are linked to the domains of racialised and racialising inequalities that
social and cultural anthropologists investigate (Harrison 1998, 2012, 2019).
Other problematic outcomes of racism include human rights violations, which
can be conceptualised along the lines delineated in the United Nation’s International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), a
treaty and also in other documents generated within the UN’s human rights regime
through its conferences and non‐governmental forums (e.g. the 2001 World Conference
against Racism in Durban, South Africa), monitoring efforts (e.g. recommendations of
the Committee for the Elimination of Racism [CERD]) and investigations undertaken
by special rapporteurs and working groups of experts (Harrison 2005, 2012, 2013).
Beyond the UN’s defence of human rights (however limited it may be because of neo-
liberal constraints, limited organisational capacity and compromised political will for
enforcement), human rights and dignity are also defended by civil society organisa-
tions and social movements. Vernacularised interpretations, which at times expand the
meanings of rights and formulate new categories of rights (e.g. the rights of nature with
its material and spiritual properties), help drive the socio‐political mobilisations that
constitute ‘globalisation from below’.
On a more philosophical note, it may be worth mentioning that racism relegates
disempowered categories of human beings, such as African descendants whose plights
are being addressed by the International Decade for Peoples of African Descent (2015–
2024), to infra‐humanity, existential non‐being and social death (Alves 2018; Patterson
2018; Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014). Ontological status has implications and ramifica-
tions for the material world in personhood, livelihood and subsistence security, quality
of life and life expectancy. It renders some categories of people more vulnerable to
repressive policing, mass incarceration and state‐sanctioned death – whether through
extra‐judicial killings (including political assassinations such as the March 2018 case in
Rio de Janeiro of the Black lesbian feminist human rights activist, municipal elected
official and sociologist Marielle Franco), or court‐mandated unfreedom and death
sentences.

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Shifting his focus from the phenomenon of social death, which is central in
Afro‐pessimist thought (Sexton 2011), Achille Mbembe (2017) places emphasis on
the ongoing resistance and especially the repeated creative repair (or reparation) that
make Black life meaningful and sustainable despite egregious systemic and inter‐
group assaults, some of which are of genocidal proportions (Vargas 2011; Alves 2018).
Anthropologists who do ethnographic work in Brazil, in spaces and places that have
come to be racialised as Black, elucidate the kinds of relations and encounters, often
marked by police and death squad violence that constitute race and mark Black bodies
even when the subalterns involved may not identify themselves in those terms.
These encounters, I think, are integral to the ‘darkening’ or ‘blackening’ of poor
people in favelas and other subaltern spaces, both urban and rural. This aspect of ‘race-
craft’ (Fields and Fields 2014) has been rather neglected in a body of literature that,
in its most conventional and hegemonic iterations, has placed the valorisation and
embodiment of mixedness (mestiçagem) and, by implication, whitening (branquea-
mento) in the foreground; accepted the thesis of the ‘mulatto escape hatch’ in racial
democracy (Degler 1971); and presumed that Black Movement activists impose an
alien racial identity on Afro‐Brazilians because they are overly influenced by cultural
imperialist notions of race from the United States. A number of ethnographers and
historians have contested these views and elucidated the various situations, encoun-
ters and moments in which self‐defined Black identities and identifications have been
forged and embraced, dating back at least to the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Paulina Alberto’s (2011) provocative archival study highlights the import of
regional variation in influencing how Afro‐Brazilians negotiated the nexus of social
identities and the ways they interpreted, appropriated or contested notions of racial
democracy. In the more industrialised south, in the São Paulo area with its higher
influx of European immigrants, African descended intellectuals and activists, some of
whom might have hypothetically claimed mixed or even white(ned) identities in other
parts of the country, embraced Blackness as a site and sense of socio‐political location,
ultimately situated within the larger Black world, where Caribbean and African inter-
locutors and places were significant. In other words, Black (US) America was not nec-
essarily at the centre of those cartographic imaginations and designs. Alberto’s book
as well as Lorand Matory’s (2005) historical anthropology of the dialogues, travels
and repatriations Afro‐Brazilians participated in to build bridges to West and Central
Africa, reveals the extent to which Afro‐Brazilians mapped themselves as navigators
of land‐ and sea‐scapes that connected them to places and peoples they considered
significant. Those experiences informed the ways Afro‐Brazilians in Bahia performed
the various modalities of their raced and gendered experiences.

Promising possibilities from conversations ARE

Network(ing) facilitates

Fortunately, the ARE Network and the intellectual synergy it promotes counters and
offers a productive alternative to the presumption that race, racism and antiracism are
unworthy of being systematically interrogated as a high‐priority concern in anthropol-
ogy’s agenda for research, critical social analysis and public engagement. The articles in
this special section of Social Anthropology speak to this concern and represent a shared
commitment to advancing our understanding of the nuances and conundrums of race

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and ethnicity in their intensified volatility. Conceptually, race and ethnicity as closely
interrelated and, indeed, inextricably entwined social vectors are being rethought and
rearticulated in the synthetic terms of ‘ethno‐racial’ distinctions (Paschel 2016). Race
and ethnicity have too often been treated separately and even dichotomously rather
than intersectionally and symbiotically on the same critical terrain and germane to
analyses of both Indigenous and Afro‐descendant communities, their social move-
ments, and the claims they make for inclusion, the rights of citizenship, the rights
of territorial sovereignty in the cases of Indigenous and ‘Tribal’ populations such as
Maroons (e.g. quilombolas, palenqueros, Saramaka, etc.), and human dignity.
The three articles representing the ethnographic core of this special theme col-
lection all provide salient insights into the cultural and historical contingencies of
ethno‐racial and class identities and dynamics within particular segments of Dutch and
Brazilian societies. Together these pieces give a glimpse of how carefully researched,
critically nuanced studies of differentiated and de‐essentialised whiteness and black-
ness can contribute new insights and raise new questions when they are viewed as het-
erogeneous sites of negotiation and navigation, wherein social actors actively engage,
embody and refashion racialisations and racecraft.

Hierarchies and multiple modalities of whiteness: new insights, new

questions

Elena Calvo‐Gonzalez’s analysis of Galician immigrants and their more class‐priv-

ileged descendants in Salvador, Bahia in Brazil brings into clearer view the internal
differentiation and shifting hierarchies among Euro‐Brazilians who have come to be
racialised as white. In a profoundly colourist society, Galicians’ phenotypes were an
advantage; however, physical appearance alone was insufficient to secure traction in
the public and private spaces where the boundaries of normative white racial belong-
ing were drawn, regulated and guarded. Calvo‐Gonzalez informs us that the collective
experience of achieving a more secure racial status through inter‐generational pro-
cesses of whitening and the incorporation of new cohorts into established spheres of
whiteness have also produced new meanings of race and challenges to some aspects of
traditional notions of whiteness. These new ideas have been fashioned from intersti-
tial moments in which ‘whiteness is there but not there’, characterised by ‘an absent
presence’.
Galician immigrants were historically stigmatised and relegated to the social bot-
tom of the ‘racial hierarchy of whiteness’ in Salvador, where African heritage and its
highly commodified ‘Afro‐paradise’ are emblematic (Smith 2016). Marked as subaltern
and inferior, with virtually none of the accoutrements associated with elite whites –
power, wealth, cultural and symbolic capitals, and privilege – Galician‐Brazilians have
experienced a modality of marginal whiteness shaped by ‘ghostly’ continuities with
their subaltern past, and the traces of ‘watermarks’ whose (in)visibility is situational
and shifting, depending on the angle from which they are seen and encountered.
‘Ghosts’ still ‘haunt’ present‐day negotiations of racial and class status. There
still exist popular perceptions of upwardly mobile Galician descendants that draw
on the stereotypes from the past, when Galicians’ sociocultural differences from elite
Bahian whites were emphasised through polarising caricatures. Today, more solidly

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middle‐class and securely whitened Galician descendants recount stories about the
bigoted assumptions some school teachers make about Galician‐Brazilian students’
intellectual capacities – similar to the racist doubts and low expectations that racial
subalterns experience in the Netherlands, as Sinan Çankaya and Paul Mepschen point
out in their ethnography of liberal and progressive middle‐class whites. Similar pre-
sumptions also drive the resentment many whites feel toward the non‐white benefi-
ciaries of affirmative action in US and Brazilian societies. Across all of these contexts,
politically and economically subordinate non‐immigrant non‐whites, targeted cate-
gories of immigrants and refugees, and low‐status whites, who may or may not be
aligned with formally organised far‐right nativists stirred by the crisis of migration, are
othered and distanced on grounds that include their purported intellectual inferiority.
When racialised ‘inferiors’ demonstrate erudition, powers of articulation and profes-
sional competence, middle‐class whites are often surprised, shocked and threatened, as
Çankaya and Mepschen poignantly show. In my own experience, both working‐ and
middle‐class whites feel not only surprised but also threatened by people of colour’s
intellectual prowess. This suggests to me something about white insecurity and frailty
(DiAngelo 2018) and the understandable inability to live up to the unreasonable expec-
tations inscribed into how white supremacists imagine whiteness.
Calvo‐Gonzalez also addresses the stereotypes or controlling images (Collins
2014) that persist of Galicians and figure prominently in jokes poking fun at their class
aspirations. The popular perception seems to be that Galician‐Brazilians are out of
place inhabiting the spaces of the white middle class and the wealthy. As members of
a nouveau middle class and nouveau‐riche sector of the elite, they are assumed to lack
sufficient cultural refinement, even though they have achieved the economic requisites
necessary for upward mobility.
I wonder if there are wider implications and effects of these seemingly innocu-
ous stereotypes beyond the micro‐ and meso‐scenarios Calvo‐Gonzalez describes. If
stereotypes perform a role as controlling images, in the manner that Black feminist
sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2014) understands them, what work is performed in
the context of white(ned) Galician descendants in Salvador, Bahia and those of other
formerly subaltern Europeans elsewhere in Brazil? Do intra‐white differences, hier-
archy or horizontal segmentation play out, however subtly, in political, economic or
sociocultural spheres, in the tensions and competitions that may arise between strata
and fractions within the same category of class?
Although Calvo‐Gonzalez does not ask these particular questions, she pro-
vides useful insights into some of the subtle mechanisms that shape the ways the
variegated racialised terrain has been navigated over time and space. The Galician‐
Salvadoran case illuminates how modalities of whiteness are crafted, lived, embod-
ied and changed at a metaphoric crossroads where immigration or citizenship
status, geographical origins and trajectories of class mobility interact as salient axes
of difference shaping the contours and parameters of contingent social outcomes.
However, dimensions of difference she does not address, but which may warrant
future scrutiny, are the positionalities and politics of gender and sexuality. Do they
also play a part in the social dramas and navigations of racecraft as intersectional fem-
inist scholars would encourage us to consider? Gendered relations and sentiments or
affects figure in the workings of social reproduction and the vertical and horizontal
shifts in identity, social location and participation in waged and salaried markets.
The role that unwaged labour and family/marital dynamics play in micro‐ and even

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macro‐economic outcomes is something that feminist economists and anthropolog-

ical political economists examine. Feminist scholarship has demonstrated the extent
to which gender and sexuality matter in configurations and reconfigurations of class
and ethno‐racial statuses as well as through (trans)national circuits of culture, power
and political economy. To more fully appreciate how the descendants of Galician
immigrants have ‘become white’, a ‘unitary theory’ of race, class and gender is nec-
essary (Brodkin 1989, 1998). This theoretical and methodological concern emerged
from interventions that antiracist, multiracial feminists have made. African and
African descendant scholar‐activists (Black feminists, Afrofeministas and feministas
Améfricanas), both within and outside of academic institutions, have played a signif-
icant but still under‐acknowledged role in framing and stimulating intra‐ and inter‐
cultural conversations on these concerns from transversal, pluriversal and decolonial
perspectives (Meridians 2016a, 2016b, b; Gonzalez 2018).

The cultural politics of race, multiple diasporas and heritage

Returning to the issues of ghosts haunting residents of Salvador, a different cluster of

ghostly appearances and disappearances are discernible in the lived experiences and
inhabited spaces of Black Bahians. Blackness and whiteness are mutually constitutive.
In mapping the wider terrain of ghosts and racialisation’s absent presence, interest-
ing questions can be raised about the intra‐ and inter‐racial dynamics and relationali-
ties that set conditions for enacting both whitening and blackening in contexts where
the discursive erasure of race and racism has been sought. Black Bahians have had to
navigate spaces of ‘social death’ shaped by the ‘afterlife’ of slavery (Alves 2018). This
existential predicament sets the stage for ethno‐racialising actions that depend, in good
part, on how Afro‐Brazilians interpret and mobilise their historical consciousness and
social memory of their heritage, whose production, interpretation and control are
highly contested among state, corporate and grassroots stakeholders.
The cultural politics of heritage, understood through the competing and
conflicting lenses of ethnically plural and distinct Africans and African descen-
dants in Amsterdam, is an important concern that Marleen de Witte interrogates
in a particularly insightful way. She sheds useful light on the intricacies of Black
Dutch identities, citizenship, migration and the cosmopolitan self‐understand-
ings of postcolonial Africans who see themselves as mobile citizens of the modern
world and map their identities and sense of belonging across borders rather than
merely within them. They are cultural hybrids, at once African and Western. The
Afropolitans de Witte identifies do not necessarily embrace this moniker because
of its racialised underpinnings. I would have liked to have heard them expound on
their notions of cosmopolitanism and modernity so readers can assess the conver-
gence de Witte’s claims.
The pluri‐ethnic situation de Witte examines can be characterised as one of
overlapping diasporas (Lewis 1995; Harrison 2006), This refers to the interaction
and tensions between disparate diasporic populations that co‐habit common (extra)
local spaces and engage in intercultural struggles over how and who gets to define
the terms and parameters of Blackness, Africanness and African heritage, which
are interrelated but should not be conflated. Afro‐Surinamese, Dutch Antilleans
and Ghanaian Dutch have experienced different routes and roots that led them to

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the Netherlands and that ground their experience of the colonial and postcolonial
relationships the Dutch and Afro‐Dutch have to Africa. Generation or age is also a
salient factor. For example, many second‐generation Ghanaians are more inclined
to self‐identify as Black vis‐à‐vis their African‐born and ‐acculturated parents,
who often reject that racial designation because it is ‘already occupied by dominant
others’. The youth have been inspired by recent waves of antiracist Black struggles
in the Netherlands as well as transnationally. Internationally publicised mobilisa-
tions against the Black Pete caricature and the increasingly transnationalised Black
Lives Matter movement (Williams 2015) have provided receptive platforms for
their ‘becoming Black’.
In some grassroots projects, racialising Africanness is avoided and the hegemonic
boundary separating North Africa from sub‐Saharan Africa, conventionally encoded
as Black Africa, is rejected. This has opened up the possibility of combining forces with
those Moroccans who express interest in their African roots. Choices about including
or excluding particular African populations arise from the ways grassroots heritage
producers engage epistemic, cultural and geopolitical struggles over competing mean-
ings, mappings and racialisations of Africa and Africanness. Similar issues have arisen
in other parts of Black Europe and certainly in Black North America’s most cosmopol-
itan settings, where proponents and lived experiences of Blackness face the challenges
of pluri‐ethnic and international(ist) diversity as they are constituted and spatially sit-
uated at this juncture of global African(a) history.
De Witte compares and contrasts two different heritage projects. The first is the
Citizens of Alkebulan (a pre‐colonial term to refer to the Continent), whose lead-
ers and members hail from Moroccan, Somali and Ghanaian backgrounds. This is the
group that shares a family resemblance with the ideas and practices associated with
Afropolitanism in various parts of modern Africa and its postcolonial African dia-
sporas. Nonetheless, some Alkebulans object to the term, because its prefix implies
racialised meanings. The second heritage project the author describes is the Afro‐
Surinamese‐dominated African History Festival whose characterisation of African
heritage is very much informed by Middle Passage routes from an African past. Afro‐
Caribbean Dutch, unlike their Ghanaian counterparts, already have legal citizenship.
They situate their history and heritage as an integral part of Dutch national culture,
whereas Ghanaians feel that they are ‘strangers in somebody else’s land’ and feel dis-
tant from both white and black Europeans.
The multiplicity of diasporas encompasses the twice or, in some cases, even
thrice diaspora‐ised (Hall 1995) or double diasporas (de Witte) of immigrants from
the Caribbean whose ancestors experienced the ‘foundational moment’ of the Middle
Passage in the transatlantic slave trade, and the new diaspora formed by postcolonial
and post‐Cold War migrations directly from African countries to Europe. These com-
plexities set the stage and its cast of characters for the heritage‐making scripts and
performances that de Witte interprets.
De Witte convincingly argues that the Dutch ethnographic case cannot be inter-
preted through a binary approach to race. Her analysis can be further nuanced by
being brought into conversation with insights from Çankaya and Mepschen’s anal-
ysis of Amsterdam’s class and politically differentiated whites. I am curious about
how Afro‐Caribbean and African Dutch heritage activists make sense of and navigate
the differences and distances among whites. Does this issue have any relevance for
acquiring material and moral support from government agencies, predominantly white

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social justice organisations, and private philanthropies? To what extent do black her-
itage projects depend on white patronage? How is it managed to offset donor‐driven
encroachment and co‐optation? I would also like to know more about how the cultural
politics and mobilisation of heritage are articulated and aligned with forms of black
political engagement. Clearly, social criticism and cultural critiques of Black Pete and
other controlling images have definite implications for antiracist and decolonial pro-
ductions of heritage. Moreover, are these grassroots projects involved in wider national
and transnational networks of Black/Black European/African/African Caribbean heri-
tage‐making and outreach?

Race, class and the peripheralisation of racist culpability

Throughout my reflections I have touched on many insights from the two ethno-
graphic projects that Sinan Çankaya and Paul Mepschen bring into dialogue. I find
their depiction of the discrepancy between white liberals and progressives’ normative
claims and ideals vis‐à‐vis what they actually say and do is utterly compelling. Their
tactics of class distancing and projecting culpability for racism onto less privileged
whites located at the cultural and political margins of liberals’ comfort zone repro-
duces the unmarked and insidiously racial character of middle‐class whiteness and its
privileges. Their embrace of liberalism and/or progressivism masks their complicity in
perpetuating racism and the great distances they will go to deny that reality and assert
their innocence. Their discomfort with both class and racial alterity is a key element in
the construction of their variety of whiteness.
This discomfort with class alterity may be especially acute for individuals whose
origins lie in the working class. What are the implications, then, for their relationships
with members of their extended families, all of whom have probably not achieved the
same level of upward mobility? Are they estranged from their working‐class relatives
and former neighbours and friends? How do they relate to ‘real racists’ when they
include their own family members? Does their intense fear of being racist and having
contact with racists have anything to do with the risk of seeing aspects of themselves in
their relatives’ faces, or seeing resemblances of their relatives in their lives? It may be
worthwhile to find out more about changes in kinship relationships along with their
affective effects in the lived experiences of middle‐class liberals and progressives who
started out in working‐class families and communities.
Another question is how progressives and particularly socialist‐leaning leftists
negotiate and reconcile contradictory views of ‘the working class’. Are workers agents
of and deserving beneficiaries of economic justice or demons deserving rejection? Are
there progressives who feel some measure of responsibility for the re‐education and
conscientisation of workers? Are there any progressives self‐critical enough to direct
their activism toward re‐educating the middle class and holding them to account for
their purported claims and converting their non‐racialism to anti‐racism?
The authors also address important methodological and ethical concerns about
ethnographic research and the relationship between perspectivism, positionality and
strategies of ethnographic storytelling and, I would add, counter‐storytelling. Their
collaboration, which does not attempt to homogenise their distinct voices, enhances
the quality of their argument.

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Anthropologists making a difference within and beyond

academic conversations

Anthropologists have acquired the kinds of knowledge that can and should play a key
role in public clarifications of the making and unmaking of racialised social differ-
ences – their effects on identity formation, embodied dispositions, enduring or shifting
locations within interlocking dimensions of social stratification, political contestation,
cultural production, and the vernacular meanings and mobilisations of heritage. A
still ongoing public initiative that Yolanda T. Moses and Alan H. Goodman, two past
presidents of the American Anthropological Association, led resulted in an accessible,
highly engaging interactive website (http://www.understandingrace.org/) and a mul-
tiple award‐winning museum exhibit, ‘Race: are we so different?’, which has travelled
across the United States for about 12 years.
These products resulted from a more than decade‐long process of collaboration
between mainly sociocultural and biological anthropologists, but over time the entire
intradisciplinarity of US anthropology came to be represented in the endeavour. We
started with informal conversations and brainstorms about what could be done to take
anthropology to the public about such an important set of issues. We eventually moved
on to building a more formally organised work group and a large interdisciplinary
advisory committee comprising diverse anthropologists, other social scientists, human
biologists, K‐12 educators and civil rights lawyers of diverse ethno‐racial backgrounds.
I was part of the small group of key advisers who developed a concept paper that even-
tually developed into a full proposal, presented the initiative to programme officers at the
Ford Foundation and consulted with the museum professionals at the Science Museum of
Minnesota, who translated the far‐ranging scholarly knowledge into an accessible, highly
interactive, multi‐modal exhibit that had something for nearly everyone who visited the
museum. The American Anthropological Association’s intent was to educate and raise
public awareness of race and human biological variation and commonality. These are not
the same thing, but have long been entangled in the popular consciousness, discourses of
domination and also the history of science as an epistemic and institutional site of struggle
(Goodman et al. 2012). The experience of collaboration, translation and public engage-
ment was more enriching and humbling than words can convey.
At a moment when public engagement and public intellectualism are being
encouraged in some prominent quarters of the discipline and profession (Current
Anthropology 2010), there are many other projects and initiatives now that are
attempting to interrupt and disrupt the normalisation and masking of ethno‐racial
hierarchies and their concomitant regimes of rule, both within nation‐states and across
transnational and global terrain. From micro‐aggressions at work to large development
aid projects in Latin America and Africa (Loftsdóttir 2009), race and its most situation-
ally salient intermeshings are present, although often ambiguously so.
The histories of world anthropologies (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006; Gledhill 2016)
can perhaps uncover instructive precedents from which new or renewed ideas can be
generated to inform strategies for publicly engaged social analysis and social criticism
grounded in multiple forms and registers of theory and practice. These range from
highly abstract and abstruse discourses for audiences within the elite academy to the
greater diversity of thought distributed across a multiplication of ‘ex‐centric’ sites con-
tributing to the relative flattening of the epistemic playing ground (Harrison 2016).

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652 FAV E V. H A R R I S O N

The scholarly and scholar‐activist work produced on race and racism, as well as
anthropology’s responsibility to expose, interrogate, theorise and help to dismantle
them, is fairly plentiful (Harrison 2019; Mullings 2005). Quite a bit of this corpus of
engaged scholarship has not necessarily been integrated into the canon. For instance,
how many of our readers are aware that the late Afro‐Brazilian Black movement activ-
ist Lélia Gonzalez (2018) was a social anthropologist who wrote compellingly about,
as well as organised against, the dominant politics of race and racism in Brazil? If she
is not widely known, the politics of reception, citation practices, teaching and mento-
ring in anthropology are implicated. Moreover, Anglophone dominance in global cir-
cuits and circulations of knowledge also contribute to gaps in what counts as validated
knowledge.
There is a great deal of challenging work that remains to be done. The conver-
sations, synergy and cross‐fertilisation that the ARE Network seeks to facilitate can
make a constructive difference in moving us toward that end. I am pleased to know that
newer cohorts of anthropologists who are pursuing critical race and ethnicity studies
are moving forward in their overlapping intellectual pursuits with a shared ethic of
care, cooperation and social responsibility.

Acknowledgements

I really appreciate Markus Balkenhol and Katharina Schramm’s generous invitation

that I write an afterword to this special section. They kept in touch with me for three
years as the publication project slowly progressed. By summer 2019, I was strongly
tempted to decline their offer because of other commitments and demands. However,
after getting around to reading the articles, I became excited and just started writing.
I ended up with this stream of reflections and queries, which I hope add something to
the conversation.

Faye V. Harrison
Department of African American Studies
1201 W. Nevada
Urbana, Illinois
United States
fvharrsn@illinois.edu

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