With Lee D. Baker, Professor of Anthropology at Duke University.
Anthropology was used as one authoritative discourse to delineate who was white and who was not white during a period of American history where people who were not quite white were suspected of changing the nation's blood and character, taking real Americans' jobs, and raising the crime rate. On the other hand, Franz Boas’s “Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants” was heralded as proof that not quite white Americans could be assimilated in one generation. Anthropology proved to be an unreliable narrator in the process of consolidating whiteness.
Presented by the Department of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research.
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Lee D. Baker is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies at Duke University. He received his B.S. from Portland State University and his doctorate in anthropology from Temple University. He has been a resident fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Johns Hopkins’s Institute for Global Studies, The University of Ghana-Legon, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center. His books include From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (1998), Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (2003), and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010)
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