12. Minorities in American Anthropology: A Personal View

America's historical minorities have been largely excluded from mainstream anthropology since the 1960s, and I will present my own experiences from the University of Chicago and elsewhere to help understand why. Let me begin by defining historical minority here in a narrow way, as including only those people of African American, Native American, Latino, and Pacific Islander groups who attended high school in the United States. There were also members of non-white groups from other regions (Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean) and recent immigrants studying anthropology at Chicago, but members of these categories were and continue to be treated differently than members of the traditional minority groups. They were usually thought to have clearer goal direction, although they were considered less idealistic.¹

I entered anthropology to find out about my own cultural background, which I knew to be very different from the culture in the white American mainstream. I also thought that anthropology could be helpful to others in my own group who had long suffered from discrimination, and to other Americans, by providing new group and personal alternatives. I knew there was little place for independent black intellectualism in America. Blacks had to consider themselves as part of some pressing issue for white America—say racism and its heritage—to be successful. I also, like many black people my age, wanted to expand my horizons by going abroad. Understanding our differing imaginations would provide a better basis for authentic contacts between members of the groups in our melting pot. Unlike St. Clair Drake, who studied the Chicago black community, I looked forward to doing fieldwork in a foreign land that had evolved differently than the United States, and wanted to look for analogous personal experiences to my own abroad. This search for analogies far from home was certainly a reason for my choice to study Malay kinship using the Malay language as virtually my only medium of communication. Let me repeat, I am presenting my own points of view and experiences as an African American anthropologist.

My Background in Anthropology before Chicago

The anthropology that I brought with me to Chicago from Brooklyn College had emphasized the Boasian outlook, with its distrust of using external theories to understand the complexity of the cultural worlds studied. I had taken courses with Joseph Jablow, Solomon Miller, Robert Ehrich, and Gerald Henderson, and received help from many others in the New York City anthropological community (Colin Turnbull, Alexander Lesser, Margaret Mead, and Hortense Powdermaker, to name a few). My teachers thought that I had the kind of questioning mind that would have a place in anthropology more than in other social science disciplines, which they considered stagnant in comparison. Malcolm X was another New Yorker who strongly encouraged me to continue in anthropology. I met him first after hearing his debates with black intellectuals on the radio, and then at Brooklyn College when we invited him to address an naacp audience. After that, Minister Shabazz and I kept running into each other around town and talking about cultural topics. He needed help with several of his speaking projects and used students like me, who shared his interest in liberation movements everywhere, to gather data for him. He urged internationalism and learning about the world beyond Europe. Malcolm X was working on a solution to the problem of racism but never finished his work. His influence on my anthropology, like that of other prominent people that I met in New York, was indirect but definite. I met fiercely independent jazz musicians in my neighborhood. These musicians had appeared on cherished lp recordings. For me good anthropology approached jazz musicianship in its structured creativity and spirituality. My civil rights activities included arranging a jazz benefit at NYU at a time that seemed make or break for the cause.²

The possibilities of the Boasian outlook go far beyond what Mead and Benedict had used it to create. Boas saw a world in which many studies of a setting could be carried out fruitfully, each with its own methodology of observation. Later Thomas Kuhn (1962) suggested to anthropologists...