Lynn Bolles

TELLING THE STORY STRAIGHT: BLACK FEMINIST

INTELLECTUAL THOUGHT IN ANTHROPOLOGY
In her introduction to Black Women Writers at
Work, Black literary critic Claudia Tate (1983:
xxvi) quotes a few lines of the Langston Hughes
poem Note on Commercial Theater that reads
someday sombodyll Stand up and talk about
me, and write about meBlack and beautiful.
Furthermore, an old African American adage
reminds us that one must speak for oneself if one
wishes to be heard. Telling the Story Straight
addresses a group of anthropologists who are
Black and beautiful women whose scholarship
needs to be talked about so they can be heard, recognized, and valued in terms of their contributions
to anthropology and to women and gender
studies.1
More than half of all members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) are
women, who by and large adhere to the basic principles of equal access, rights, and opportunities
regardless of gender.2 However, White privilege,
the dominant systemic ideology of the United
States is embedded in all levels of the academy. It
is White privilege that allows White feminist
anthropologists to carry out normative practices
of exclusion of their Black feminist counterparts
from the activities that count in the academy such
as recognition and citation. I contend that all
Black women anthropologists are politically aware
of their status as being both raced and gendered in
departments of anthropology and in womens and
gender studies. I use the terms Black and African
American interchangeably. Therefore, this discussion has two broad missions. There is the matter
of the right to be heard and to have ones presence
acknowledged that helps explain why the Black
female voice in anthropology is not fully included
in the reading and the teaching of anthropology.
Second, this discussion begins to set an agenda for
articulating a Black feminist intellectual thought in
anthropology.
The concept of double jeopardy (Beale 1970)
(being Black and female) is a good explanatory
tool to decipher the situations faced by Black
women anthropologists in the politics of the

academy where exclusionary practices are not often

challenged, despite AAA committees. This current
work demonstrates how the female academic intellect that is raced Black is relatively excluded in
the scholarship of European American feminist
anthropology colleagues. Despite employing analytical tools that dissect the structural and cultural
implications of race, gender, ethnic, economic, and
other forms of social inequality found across the
globe, these same feminist anthropologists have
basically rendered Black feminist anthropology
almost invisible. I argue that race trumps gender in departments and in signicant feminist
publications over the past 30 years. Subsequently,
there continues to be a struggle to gain respect, recognition, and prominence in the eld of anthropology by Black feminist anthropologists. Over 10
years ago I wrote (Bolles 2001:14) that for as long
as there have been graduates of anthropology
departments, there have been Black women who
studied this eld of inquiry. According to my
informal accounting, there are now almost 100
Black women who earned the doctorate in anthropology. Besides my own counting, I also put a call
on the Association of Black Anthropologist listserv
to contribute to this act of discovery. The late
anthropologist John Gwaltney (1981) remarked
that telling the story straight was a way of correcting history and correcting the stereotypes and
dominant paradigms that often misaligned and
misrepresented Black people. Here, this work of
telling the story straight focuses on Black women
anthropologists and including them into a more
inclusive history of anthropology.
This work combines dierent elements of the
self-reective, the informal sharing of information
and experiences among Black feminist anthropologists, with the intellectual production of African
and African American women anthropologists. At
this juncture of the 21st century, our students and
colleagues need to know the lifework of African
American women anthropologists and more
importantly, the contributions they have made to
this discipline.

Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 21, Number 1, pp. 5771, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. 2013 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/traa.12000.

57

DECOLONIZING FEMINIST
ANTHROPOLOGY
To borrow a concept from the eminent historian
Carter G. Woodson, there is a problem of miseducation in anthropological thought and pointedly
in feminist anthropology in instruction, research,
and writing about Black anthropology and Black
feminist anthropology. The ways of miseducation in anthropology are the glaring omissions in
citations, and exclusion from discussions that
establish recognition in the eld. And my goal in
this article is to examine the how, why, and where
exclusions occur and the consequences of
omission.
To tell the story straight requires contextualizing and laying a foundation. To do so, we
must unpack how exclusion, racism, and elitism
can be carried out in the name of feminist anthropology. There is homework to be done on the
home front, meaning in the politics of the department and in the structure of courses, particularly
those critical to the development of the discipline.
I use the notion of homework beyond Kamala
Visweswarans use of the phrase (1994:101). Here,
homework refers more than anthropological eldwork into U.S. life and culture, but to literally
casting a critical eye and ear in the oce, in the
classroom, in the departmental meeting, and in the
entire academic praxis. Brackette Williams
(1995:25) captures the expansive concept of
homework. She says that doing ones homework
is to gather information in order to be an
informed citizen capable of acting in a morally
conscientious manner toward a particular category
of persons who share the identity fellow citizen.
Homework in this instance is about understanding
what must be done, why it must be done, and
what are the consequences are doing it one way
and not another. Williams purposely left aside
the ongoing dilemmas of eldwork among the primarily non-White, indigenous, poor, and workingclass women whose lives and experiences that
anthropologists represent on the printed page, on
lm, or in other discursive texts. In this context
homework must be applied to all situations particularly when those fellow citizens are ones own
colleagues.
In their introduction to Situated Lives, editors
Louise Lamphere, Helene Ragone, and Patricia
Zavella (1997:3) remark that second-wave feminists and critical anthropologists now question
the nature of our relationship to our subjects and
examine the way in which our writing reects the
power relations embedded in the research setting.
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The question is does the power relations on the

home front of the department, for example,
between advisor and graduate student and in other
academic politics, garner equal attention as in the
eldwork scenario? How can we motivate ourselves to be morally conscientious doing the best
homework possible for our fellow citizen who
is a Black woman anthropologist?
Clearly, over the past three decades, a rich literature emerged examining many women anthropologists, including both those few who have
entered the canon and those who have not (Lewin
2006; Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 2000). The work of
decolonizing anthropology runs parallel to this
process of feminist recovery; it too includes a
strongly historical component which focuses on
lost gures. I argue that we presently face a critical
juncture in feminist anthropology by which the
hard-won lessons gleaned from a recovery of
female ancestors and validation of their work is
just one way to contribute to the way we decolonize the eld. What does decolonizing really mean
and how can it help feminist anthropology in
terms of addressing the issue of miseducation/
omission?
Faye V. Harrisons (1991[1997, 2010]) introduction to Decolonizing Anthropology presents the
paradigm enacted by decolonizing eorts of
progressive anthropologists. The work calls for the
transformation of anthropology, the child of imperialism, at a time when post modern claims question the validity and worth of the disciplinethe
most humanist of the social sciences, and the most
scientic of the humanities (Wolf 1964). However,
it is that same unique history and praxis that calls
for transformative eorts from within the discipline that comes from the experiences and struggles of people of the global south, or so-called
developing world (Africa, Asia, the Pacic, Latin
America, and the Caribbean), and the belly of
the beast, namely the internal colonies within the
advanced industrial north, the location of the
majority of anthropological research to date.
Identied are four major streams that contribute to decolonizing eorts in anthropology, but are
applicable to any eld of study. It draws on a neoMarxist political economy; it experiments in interpretive and reexive ethnographic analysis; it
includes a feminism that underscores the impact
race and class have upon gender; and it has traditions radical of Black and (other) global scholarship which acknowledges the interplay between
race and other forms of invidious dierence, notably class and gender (Harrison 1991:24). It

becomes imperative to revisit and to critically build

upon a body of knowledge produced by anthropologists who were generally forced to work and
struggle on the intellectual periphery, such as Zora
Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus,
and Vera Green, all of whom were anthropologists
and African American women. Hurston, Dunham,
and Primus developed as humanist anthropologists
and as cultural producers who pushed the boundaries of the discipline of their era with their creative
innovations. Their self-reexive and politically
nuanced interpretations of African Diaspora
cultures challenged an objective science approach,
valued by their peers and mentors. Vera Greens
commentary of the misrepresentation of impoverished people in U.S. social policy countered the
prevailing stereotypes of poor Black Americans
(Green 1972). Collectively, they became peripheral
and invisible due to their race and gender. It
behooves contemporary anthropologists to become
acquainted with these marginalized scholars as
their careers addressed the issues of the miseducation/omission specically in feminist anthropology
and in anthropology.
A decolonized anthropology recognizes and
promotes development of theories based on nonWestern precepts and assumptions. This underscores the point made by John L. Gwaltney
(1981), Bolles (1987, 1996), and echoed by Patricia
Hill Collins (1989) Black Feminist Thought,
whereby history and intellectual authority rest
with the people in the community, legitimizing
those everyday standpoints as valuable in and outside of that setting. A decolonized feminist position articulated in a feminist anthropological study
has no boundaries of what it can do and say, by
and for the populations it represents.
Over 20 years ago Aihwa Ong (1988:80)
argued that Western feminists tended to objectify
non-Western women by relegating their status to
other. Contemporary feminist anthropology has
been trying and continues to try and readdress this
history through a process of recovery and historical analysis. However, as mentioned earlier, it
might be easier for many feminists to follow democratic practices in the safety of the eld where
female anthropologists may pass as honorary
males in some societies, or as persons of higher
status based on their membership in a Western
culture, (Visweswaran 1994:29) than on the home
front of the department.
Early on, decolonizing eorts on the home
front was a perspective argued for by Black
anthropologists and their allies. African American

feminist anthropologist Diane Lewis (1973) stated

First World anthropologists need to study their
own cultures and (how their) involvement in his
(her) culture has aected the development of theory and method in the discipline, but it may turn
out that this seriously skewed perspective in other
cultures. In her chapter in Decolonizing Anthropology, Deborah DAmico (then Samuels)
(1991:69) argues that we (anthropologists) need to
stop talking about the eld as separated from
the academy and real life. She says that boundaries are constantly blurred as anthropologists
research, write, and think in a variety of locations.
The illusion of separation between the eld and
the academy is dangerous and expensive to the
people under study. Gina Ulysse (2007:7) demands
that we ip the script of dominant discourses. In
other words, the privileges accorded in the eld
setting may provide the basis for continuing to
other women. Or, despite democratizing the
eldwork experience, women anthropologists are
not able or willing to apply decolonizing eorts
back home in the academy. Therefore, othering,
White privilege and the reproduction of omission
and other exclusionary practices abound. How
does this happen, when feminist anthropology and
the eld of women and gender studies has argued
for understanding experiences through an intersectional lens and being champions of cross-comparative analysis?
One of the issues facing women and gender
studies in the United States has been its own history (circa the late 1960s) that promoted a narrow
vision of womens lives and experiences that centered around being White, middle class, educated
and often from the northeast. Over the years
womens studies broadened its scope of vision and
embraced an analytical framework that focused on
the complexity of social factors that intersect an
individuals circumstance and identity, and
reduced a binary perspective. In the late 1980s,
Black and Latina feminist sociologists applied
what they called an intersectional approach to
understanding the situations of the women featured in their scholarship (King 1988; Brewer
1989; Garcia 1989; Segura 1987). More broadly,
they used this framework to understand their own
lives and experiences. This concept became a valuable analytical tool because it was relevant to
understanding aspects of scholarship and research,
including examining the structure of the academy.
Consequently, feminist anthropologists, particularly those who were housed in womens studies or
have aliation with that interdisciplinary eld
Lynn Bolles

59

were now fully equipped with three important paradigms. The rst was to critically address issues of
othering other women in the eldwork setting
that came with true incorporation of a decolonized
eort in feminist anthropological scholarship. The
second paradigm was the ability to apply an intersectional lens not only in their scholarship as a
way of understanding social structures but also to
be of use while encountering a range of social formations in their own everyday life. Finally, when
adopting Brackette Williams concept of fellow citizenship, whereby what must be done, why it must
be done, and what are the consequences of doing
it one way and not another became an essential
habit in doing ones homework in both research
in the eld and on the home front in the department and the academy at large.
There is no doubt that the discipline of
anthropology reinvented itself to address the populations and issues traditionally studied, by whom,
in what ways, and toward what end (Cole 2001:x).
The substantial changes over the course of two
decades (1960s1970s) laid the foundation for feminist anthropology. However, despite all of the
embracing of dierences among folk in the eld,
and the use of various theories to understand the
variation in humankind, the determining locus and
structure of power still is in place. Suggested practices of decolonization, intersectional thinking, and
doing ones fellow citizenry homework conict
with White privilege, the dominant discourse of
everyday living in the United States. Almost all
anthropology departments3 are profoundly situated in predominately White locations and the
majority of anthropologists are white women. Was
it dierent when the majority of anthropologists
were canon-setting White men? Yes. When the
vast majority of anthropologists were White men,
their female counterparts (of course there were
exceptions) were often marginal to the benets of
membership and their scholarship was devalued as
examined by numerous authors (Morgen 1988). As
the predominately White academy expanded to
include womens studies and African American
studies more Black women entered the eld of
anthropology. Given the history of the marginalization of White women scholars in anthropology,
it seems expected that the discipline would
embrace the Black women who chose the eld as a
career. There are great champions among women
anthropologists who took great strides to open the
doors allowing more women to enter the academy
and who remained in departments. If this is the
case, why are feminist Black anthropologists
60

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excluded among those scholars who are cited? I

contend that the White privilege of European
American feminist anthropologists is at the root of
this exclusion.
Critical race theory posits that White privilege
is a way of conceptualizing racial inequalities that
focuses as much on the advantages that Whites
accrue as on the disadvantages that people of
color experience. White privilege views European
Americansthe dominant groupas the social,
cultural, and economic experience as the norm and
the model that everyone else should experience. Its
reliability rests on White appearance as a marker
of social consent. It is an overarching, comprehensive framework of policies, practices, institutions,
and cultural norms that undergird every aspect of
U.S. society (www.the praxisproject.org/tools/
White-Privilege.pdf). Furthermore, institutional
racism ideologically shores up and reconrms
White privilege that operates on the ground in
daily activities reinforcing this dominant systemic
cultural practice (Rothenberg 2004; Lipsitz 1998:
Brodkin 1998).
Let us just consider Peggy McIntoshs popular
classic piece, White Privilege: Unpacking the
Invisible
Knapsack(www.nybp.org/reference/
WhitePrivilege.pdf) that demonstrates how White
privilege works on the ground. First published in
1988, The Invisible Knapsack is used in high
schools, colleges, and universities across the United States in all kinds of classroom settings, and
cited in a wide spectrum of academic publications.
It serves as a mainstay in Womens Studies
because it is a good illustration of how racial and
gender dominance works in U.S. society, particularly for those who question this fact. My use of
the familiar the Invisible Knapsack demonstrates the power of White privilege to those who
may teach it, but do not actualize or realize its
message in their own daily lives. The normative
power of White privilege is conveyed in overt racist practices, as well as in the subterranean quietly
hidden ways of benign and subtle tendencies of
racism. Understanding this normative power helps
to validate the but I should have realized comment often rendered by colleagues in defense of
their exclusionary practice of White privilege in
feminist anthropology.
Peggy McIntosh admits that she chose skincolor privilege over class or religion to best illustrate the most obvious daily practices of White
privilege to drive home her point. There are 26
social conditions she wants us to consider. From
my own use of the Invisible Knapsack in the

classroom, just the last one, I can choose blemish

cover or bandages in esh color and have them
more or less match my skin was taken care of by
the health aids industry as was the issue of esh
tinted crayons. Several of McIntoshs conditions
are applicable to the experiences of most Black
feminist anthropologists in the predominately
White academy. Included are issues of physical
and social isolation, constantly being asked to
speak for and represent ones race, feeling outnumbered and unheard in professional organizations, and taking a job without suspect of a
armative action agenda by coworkers.
The importance of understanding power and
who controls it is a critical element in understanding the Invisible Knapsack and its applicability
in contemporary feminist anthropological practice.
As theoretically minimalist as the Knapsack
might be, the contents of the concept demonstrate
how White privilege is conveyed in ones own personhood and actions. Without an intense understanding of the ingrained power of White privilege
by European American anthropologists their
exclusionary practices continue and the eorts of
decolonizing feminist anthropology, eective intersectional research, and acting as fellow citizens will
be muted. The self-acknowledgement of the power
of White privilege cannot be overrated. The next
generation of White feminist anthropologists needs
to unpack the invisible knapsack to challenge the
politics of the department that explicitly impact
the status of the Black woman intellectual in
academy.
In her essay Balancing the Personal and
Professional, Black feminist anthropologist,
Adrianne Andrews (1993:179) states, I have been
plagued with feelings of ambivalence surrounding
my membership in the group of others known as
anthropologists. She goes on, there was a certain arrogance, associated with the assumption of
the right to study people, that is yet another outcome of the European pursuit of an identity by
using the other taken literally and with Caucasian implicit. Andrews still found something of
value in her wide reading of anthropological texts.
She concludes that African and African American
anthropologists can enable Black people to reect
on our multifaceted selves.
In many conversations with other Black
women anthropologists, similar concerns are often
repeated. How complicated the story becomes has
to do with the depth of my personal relationship
with the teller. Nonetheless, many of these stories
are survival stories passed down from one genera-

tion to the next. This is critical point because most

Black women anthropologists work in isolation.
This isolation begins in graduate school and can
continue into the eldwork experience (complicated by nationality, education, class, gender, and
other dierences) and on the job, particularly in
predominately White institutions. The case of the
isolated Black woman anthropologist is changing
somewhat as more women than ever choose the
eld of anthropology as a career. Still, many
young women must still meet their rst fellow
Black woman anthropologist at the annual AAA
and Association of Black Anthropology (ABA)
meetings because of the overall low numbers in
departments across the United States.
POLITICS OF THE ACADEMY
In her coauthored book with Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life bell
hooks remarks about the invisibility of the Black
woman intellectual. She (1991:151) states, This is
why it is so dicult for students to name us. The
term intellectual here refers to being dedicated
to activities of reading, writing, producing knowledge, and conversing on subjects as an expert. In
the discipline of anthropology, this dictum is profound and complicated further if the individual
woman identied herself as a feminist or womanist (code for being a trouble maker) in these
isolated academic settings (hooks 1991:149).
This persona of the Black woman intellectual
counters the historical perception of the Black
woman whose body is to be controlled through
physical or stereotyped innuendo. It is the body
that is expected to selessly serve others, cleaning
up, and mothering (McKay 1997). The mind
was something included in the package, but
received little recognition. The production of
knowledge emanating from a Black female intellectual body has relatively little sway in the large
scheme of the academy. Hence, as hooks suggests,
our students cannot name Black women anthropologists or other Black women intellectuals outside of the handful who have crossed over into the
mainstream in the past 20 years. Who gets to cross
that road of acceptance?
Without a doubt, the academy is a hierarchical
system that rewards those who it deems worthy of
celebrating and providing the opportunity for promotion, particularly when individuals fulll more
than the usual faculty duties. How this system
operates depends on each institution and its internal politics. This means that all scholars in the
system are under scrutiny and expected to perform
Lynn Bolles

61

at some rate that is valued by that institution.

Recognition on an international level, publication
in preferred journals and book publishers, acquiring large grants and funding from prestigious
agencies including the U.S. Government, placing
newly minted graduate students in top-tier institutions as their rst site of employment, and quality
teaching are just some of the criteria for this kind
of reward. A similar evaluation system applies for
small liberal arts colleges, where a premium
emphasis is placed on good teaching. Clearly, there
are a limited number of individuals who garner all
of those qualifying valued elements. What does this
mean for Black women in higher education at
large? According to an article by Sheila Gregory
(2001) only one percent of full-time Black women
faculty are members of academic departments in
predominately White institutions (PWI) whereas
the rest are found in historical Black colleges and
universities (HBCU). The Journal of Blacks in
Higher Education collected data in 2007 that
looked at the 27 highest-ranking institutions in the
United States. Only ve had a Black faculty of at
least ve percent (www.jbe.com/feature55_blackfaculty). Those institutions were Columbia, Brown,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and all oered
the doctorate in anthropology. And according to
the ve department websites, only three Black
women were listed as members of that faculty. The
2011 National Research Council (NRC) report
(www.nap.edu/rdp) used data collected in 2005/6
and ranked institutions of higher learning by the
productivity of their doctoral granting departments. The ranking is based on the scholarly output of their faculty with emphasis on who cites
whom, how often they were cited, and the stature
of the publication in which they were cited. There
were 83 anthropology departments in the NRC
report. Clearly, the burden and the standards of
scholarly productivity make it dicult for any
scholar in the academy to be rewarded. According
to Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (www.
jbhe.com/news_views/62_blackfaculty.html) thirtyve percent of Black faculty held tenure in 2007
compared to 44.6% of Whites. The JBHE report
also noted and commented that in a period of
economic crisis, nontenured Black faculties are
disproportionately vulnerable to tenure denial.
Therefore, in addition to a structure that is discriminatory in the rst place, Black women in
anthropology must also contend with exclusionary
practices within the discipline and deal with the
politics of publication.
62

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As any woman faculty member can attest to,

being multitask oriented is the key to survival in
the academy. Whether on a tenure track line or
hoping that an adjunct position will become one
with a promise of permanent status, the pressure
of succeeding in the academy is real. Although the
role of teacher, advisor, and department representative to every diversity initiative on campus earns
status points in both historically Black and predominately White institutional settings, a Black
woman being too intellectual is another matter.
What to do with the Black female body with a
mind? Dull her wits with countless collegial duties
on top of everything else, such as a personal life
and a professional career? Collectively, these kinds
of activities undermine any capacity to convey skill
and intellectual abilities and of course, drain personal energy. The late Black feminist literary critic
Nellie McKay wrote (1997:21) the Black women
I know complain constantly of overwork, more is
expected of them than of others by students, other
faculty, administrators, and the professional organizations to which they belong. Signicantly,
what this suggests is being weird, strange and
dangerous, (intellectual) all the while unselshly
serving is something only a Black woman who can
double (race and gender) or triple (race, gender,
junior or senior level hire) a departments human
resource accounting. Former president of the
American Anthropological Association, Yolanda
Moses (1997) analyzed the situation in a monograph for the Association of Colleges and Universities on the Status of Black Women Professionals
in Higher Education. Moses examined quantitative
and qualitative data regarding the amount of service to the institution, heavy advising and mentoring loads, and the paucity of citation of Black
women scholars by the majority in their elds.
The study concluded that Black women serve
more leadership and subservient roles in university
life than their Black male colleagues or White
female counterparts.
Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber, Elizabeth
Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill (1986:
290-300) warn, Without serious structural eorts
to combat racism and classism so prevalent in our
society, womens studies will continue to replicate
its bias and thus contribute to the persistence of
inequality. These founders of the Center for
Research on Women in Memphis implore colleagues (1986:302) we must commit ourselves to
learning about each other so that we may accomplish our goals without paternalism, materialism,
or guilt take the personal and professional risks

involved in building alliances, listening to and

respecting people who have rsthand knowledge
of how to cope with oppression. That 1986 essay
came at an important developmental moment in
Womens Studies, and over the years, the process
has seen some success stories and some dismal failures across the disciplines of the academy.
Marilyn Saunders Mobley, a Black feminist
literary critic examines the institutionalized privilege that benets Euro-American feminist scholars.
Mobleys chapter in Sister Scholar (2002:231-253)
looks at the politics of labor for Black women
scholars as they shift from identities of professor
to administrator, to institutional service workers
and who are then alienated in their own disciplines. Citing Black feminist critic Anne DuCille,
Mobley says (2002:247), We experience both
hypervisibility and a super isolation by virtue of
[our] racial and gender dierence, on one hand,
even as we nd ourselves drawn as exemplars
and used up as icons [and]nd [ourselves]
chewed up and spit out because we did not
publish.
Mobley also examines the ways in which
Black womens scholarship often goes unnoticed
and unquoted in the work of other literary scholars. She remarks, When Black women are
quoted, it is often our anecdotal human interest
contributions rather than our scholarship that is
valued. How can Black women interrupt this
dominant pattern so that their scholarship can be
heard/read/used/included/critiqued? Mobley argues
that the critical weight of writing and publishing
books is a double burden for the isolated Black
scholar who must survive (self and family), take
care of departments, be mentors, and often be
responsible for all of the students of color and
their issues on campus.
Historian Deborah White-Grays Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower
(2008) is a collection of essays written by 16 prominent women scholars and their trajectories in the
profession of history. Wanda Hendricks notes
(2008:153) that a senior White colleague insisted
that as her minority status was in two categories
this meant that she had responsibilities to the
department, the university, the students, particularly African American students, and to Black
people in general. He did not ask any junior White
faculty to meet these criteria nor did he engage in
similar discussions. In her own essay, Deborah
Gray White (2008:99) writes, I can still go to
AHA (American Historical Association) conventions and wonder if I am in the right professional

place. After thirty years, it still feels alien. I can

still open books, even those written by feminists,
and not nd African American women in places
they should be.
The absence of African American women in
the eld of anthropology is similar to that of literature and history. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz
(1991:611-627) points out that writing, citation,
and other canon-setting patterns in the recent literature of sociocultural anthropology reveal the
impact of gender relations. Let us push this
argument a bit further than Lutz proposed. The
scholarly production by certain groups of anthropologists does reveal gendered situations, but these
are compounded by race. Scholars of color, in this
case African American women anthropologists,
are in very specic locations for becoming faceless
and voiceless in the anthropological record. It is
no longer the case that there arent any Black
anthropologists available to hire as the trends
show otherwise. The number of Black anthropologists found in any one department is still in the
low single digits or in the case of University of
Maryland where there are four (www.jbe.com/
feature55_blackfaculty). According to my own
counting there are at least 76 Black women
anthropologists
with
doctorates,
currently
employed on various faculties in higher education.
(Supplemental Information: BOLLES: LIST OF
BLACK WOMEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS). At
issue is not if they are better than, or equal to
their White counterparts. Rather, the issue is that
because of their double jeopardy status Black
women work under the burden of double duty, as
mentioned by our historian colleague Wanda Hendricks (2008). They often work in isolation and
are still required to fulll the standard expectations for promotion and tenure. Furthermore,
these women work under the weight of White privilege systems that are reinforced by the academy,
which reproduce the isolation?
The intellectual work of Black women feminist
anthropologists competes against this combination
of forces by which academic success is measured.
One does not receive tenure for the number of
committees one serves, or for the number of students one mentors. What counts is acceptable
scholarly production, the standards of which vary
according to dierent institutional expectations.
The assessment of what counts in the academy
may not satisfy the scholar, or represent what are
that womans own scholarly pursuits.
Sometimes Black woman intellectuals work is
more oriented toward activism rather than toward
Lynn Bolles

63

the academy. Clearly this kind of work is not

rewarded by the academys scheme of what
counts as scholarly production. However, it
serves as a model of what scholars could be doing
as public anthropologists and not be discounted
by the academy. Given the scope of concerns
addressed by Black women anthropologists, these
issues often require two kinds of submissions for
the same set of materials. One submission may be
in a popular format (verbal or written) whereas
the other attends to an academic audience. There
are numerous examples of publications written for
multiple audiences. Irma McClaurins 2002 ethnobiography of Zora Neale Hurston appeared in
popular publications whereas her academic study
was slated to appear elsewhere. Leith Mullings
and Alaka Walis publications of their Maternal
Health Project in Harlem arrived in three formats:
one report for the sponsoring agency, one report
for the community, and one book for the academy, Social Context of Reproduction in Central
Harlem (2001). In a similar fashion, the multipleauthored book In the Shadows in the Sun (Deere
and Safa 1991) also came in three versionsone
written in popular language (English and Spanish)
for dissemination to the rankand le of U.S.
organized laborone written for members of congress on the Hill in Washington, DC, and one
for the academy. The incomparable Angela Gilliam publishes in various forms and in dierent
languages. For example, her article From Roxbury to RioAnd Back in a Hurry rst appeared
in the Journal of Black Poetry (1970). The work
was expanded for an academic audience as Black
and White in Latin America, published in PanAfrican Journal (1974), then republished in French
for Presence Africaine and then once again in English as a chapter in the edited volume, AfricanAmerican Reflections on Brazils Racial Paradise
(1992). Gilliams scholarship, written in Portuguese
and other languages, appears in Brazilian popular
and academic texts.
In addition, Black women have long made
unaccounted for theoretical and methodological
contributions. Black feminist anthropology has
been engaged in discovery, and has used all of the
theoretical trends that have captured the anthropological imagination to assess if they were the
answer to the social nemesisracism. After all,
looking for the cure for racism and other forms of
inequality has been the focal point of Black
anthropological discourse since the time of Caroline Bond Day. She was a race woman and a
graduate of Atlanta University in 1912. She went
64

Transforming Anthropology

VOL. 21(1)

on to earn an undergraduate from Harvard (BA

Radclie 1919). Bond Day became the rst Black
American to earn a graduate degree in anthropology in 1932, also from Harvard (Bolles 2001:29).
Her work argued against eugenics and the biologizing of racial dierences that was the prominent
theory of the day.
There is more recent examples Black women
anthropological vanguard work. For example in
2010, the School of American Research hosted a
seminar, Katherine Dunham and the Anthropology of Dance: Theory, Experiment, and Social
Engagement organized by Elizabeth Chin. This
seminar, out of which an edited scholarly production is forthcoming, includes the work of three
Black women anthropologists, A. Lynn Bolles,
Aimee Cox, and Dana Ain Davis. During the June
seminar at the Santa Fe campus, the participants
performed an interactive, interpretative presentation of Katherine Dunhams scholarly production
in anthropology and her artistic contributions.
The group also took part in the National Dance
Institute in Santa Fe participating in a master
class on the Dunham technique, led by Elizabeth
Chin. They danced the research to performance
method that is fundamental to Dunhams production of anthropological theory. But who teaches
Bond Day and Dunham in anthropology
departments?
Another example of multimethod scholarship
is Deborah A. Thomass lm Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens and her book, Exceptional Violence (2011). The volume includes a
chapter on the Coral Garden incident, an almost
forgotten story in Jamaican history except within
Rastafari communities. The chapter provides the
methodologies used to make the lm and its use
of participatory research techniques.
Some of the new bodies of theories, such as
self-reexivity, poststructuralism, and multiple
methods, are not particularly new from a Black
feminist anthropological perspective. Alternative
methods in anthropology were a mainstay of the
Black women pioneers, Zora Neale Hurston,
Katherine Dunham, Irene Diggs, and Vera Green.
These pioneers developed theories that were fashioned through their political actions as artists,
leaders, teachers, and policy critics, all of which
made them public anthropologists before it was in
vogue.
Setting the standard of the discourse on
colonialism and imperialism, Diane Lewis article
in a 1973 issue of Current Anthropology predated
the discussions of world systems theory. The

intersection of class, nationality, gender, and racial

relations between the woman native anthropologist and the kindred folk in the eldwork experience was explored by Niara Sudarkasa (nee Gloria
Marshall) during the 1960s, well before feminist
reexive anthropology came into being. And the
list continues on as the pioneering work of Black
women anthropologists goes unrecognized by not
only the mainstream of the discipline but also
those who considered these issues decades later
and thought that they had invented the wheel.
Some of these critical theories are taken up by
contemporary Black feminist anthropologists (e.g.
Thomas 2002; Slocum 1999; Simmons 2009; Williams 2011) and has hopefully expanded everyones
knowledge.
INVITATION TO CONTRIBUTE, CITATION,
AND RECOGNITION
The important work of Black feminist anthropologists is not only marginalized or made invisible by
the canon-setting White men, who, until quite
recently, controlled anthropology and are its primary practitioners, but as I emphasized earlier,
also by their European American feminist counterparts. As I suggest below, many of the writers of
the key canonical texts in feminist anthropology
reproduced the practices of exclusion practiced by
the discipline at large. A quick review of six major
texts of women, gender, and feminist anthropology
provides a clue to the answer.
The two foundational texts in feminist anthropology were published within months of each
other, Women, Culture and Society (1974) edited
by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere and
Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975) edited
by Rayna Rapp (then Reiter). Between the two,
only one of the contributors was African AmericanSusan Brown, who like many of the contributors to the text was advanced anthropology
graduate student at University Michigan. At the
same time, Black women anthropologists, as graduate students, untenured and the few tenured ones
were working toward building the Association of
Black Anthropologists as their research on women
was embedded in the struggles of colonialism, neocolonialism, and racism at home and abroad. They
knew each others names and supported one
another. Outside of Susan Brown, they were not
invited to join the feminist anthropological publishing collaborations of that time.
During the 1970s, the classic text All the
Women were White, all Blacks were Men, But
Some of us were Brave (1982) edited by Black fem-

inist scholars, Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott,

and Barbara Smith, was published. Although this
text relies more on literary scholarship, it attested
to the fact that Black feminists were not on the
agenda in nascent womens studies programs. This
kind of feminism was an outgrowth of Black
womens activism in the 1960s Black power movements. Many White feminist anthropologists did
not know just how brave Black women anthropologists really were as they tried to bridge, to
appease, and to satisfy the demands of the academic units of anthropology, African American/
Black Studies, and womens studies programs.
The two foundational texts, Women, Culture
and Society (1974) and Toward an Anthropology of
Women (1975) drew criticism from Black feminist
anthropologists and sociologists, with most of the
disapproval directed toward some of the chapters
in the Rosaldo and Lamphere volume. For example, Sherry Ortners essay was faulted for its
supposed universality of the gendered domestic
division of labor and supported by a theory of
universal sex asymmetry (see Sudarkasa 1987).
Toward an Anthropology of Women did not
contain any research coming from Black America,
but the Black world was represented in chapters
on Nigeria, Colombia, South Africa, and the
Dominican Republic. Outside of Browns chapter,
the only readily identiable Black scholar cited
in the bibliography was Black womanist
anthropologist, Diane Lewis.
Fast forward to 1988, when The Association
for Feminist Anthropology (AFA) became a section of the American Anthropological Association.
Feminist Anthropology gained credibility as a
body of knowledge, and gender studies relied
heavily upon feminist anthropological resources
for its scholarly production. During those years,
more anthropologists than ever before joined
Womens Studies departments, programs, and
clusters across the globe. Sandra Morgens (1989)
Gender and Anthropology made a deliberate eort
to be inclusive of Black feminist scholars and
scholarship. The text was written as a guide to
anthropologists to be inclusive of feminist work in
the discipline and to transform introductory
course oerings. There are two Black American
(A. Lynn Bolles and Leith Mullings) and one African-born (Lina Fruzzetti) women contributors to
the volume. Morgens exceptionally thorough and
edifying introduction (1989:1-20) provided an
up-to-date, state-of-the-art discussion of feminist
anthropological research as it challenged the dominant paradigms in all subelds of the discipline
Lynn Bolles

65

and its relationship to Womens Studies scholarship. It was in those pages that British feminist
anthropologist, Henrietta Moores book, Feminism
and Anthropology (1989) surfaced as an important
text.
Moores text provided a signicant amount of
information about the history of anthropology
and its women contributors. However, it was a
great disappointment in terms of the way women
of Africa and those of African descent become
subjects from the eld and any other theoretical
contributions were viewed as just identity politics. Moore contributed to the invisibility of Black
feminist anthropologists because she relied on
White feminist anthropologists to provide her
material, all of who drew a blank on the scholarship of their Black feminist colleagues. As a scholar of great stature herself, Henrietta Moore could
have looked more carefully into who was excluded
from feminist anthropological scholarship and
included those scholars in her own work. There
are seven Black women anthropologists, six of
whom are African born or based (ve working on
the continent, one primarily in India), and one is
African American, Diane Lewis. Moore found herself relying on the theoretical contributions of
Black American literary critics such as bell hooks,
and the But Some of us Are Brave contributors to
make her argument. U.S. feminist anthropologists
did not cite their Black feminist colleagues; therefore, their body of work was excluded from this
inuential, but exclusionary scholarship.
Another example of exclusion came from a
highly acclaimed volume, Michaela di Leonardos
(1991) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge. In
her introduction, Di Leonardo recounted her perspective on the theoretical shift staking place in
feminist anthropological projects and its relation
to the history of the discipline at large. A point is
made that unlike the early bibles of feminist
anthropology, not all the contributors are White
women. Here in Gender at the Crossroads the
contributors include one man, and two women of
color, (Patricia Zavella and African American biological anthropologist Nadine Peacock). In terms
of the inclusion of Black feminist anthropological
thought, there was none. There were no references
in the introduction and a handful of names were
randomly scattered in citations throughout the
essays.
Following the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the two foundational texts, Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragone, and Patricia Zavella
published Situated Lives Gender and Culture in
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VOL. 21(1)

Everyday Life (1997). The chapters of this volume

position the constructs of gender in relation to the
historical and material circumstances where race,
class, and sexuality intersect and impact on everyday life. Of the 26 chapters only one Black feminist anthropologist is included in the text. In her
chapter, Faye Harrison cites her sister Black feminist anthropologists, especially those who work in
the Caribbean. As a matter of fact, the invisibility
was more apparent in the index that only references the following Black scholars: anthropologist,
Delmos Jones; literary giants, Toni Morrison,
James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison; and feminist
sociologist Patricia Hill Collins.
In 2006, Ellen Lewin edited Feminist Anthropology, A Reader. Overall it is a collection of some
of the valuable contributions of feminist anthropology to the larger body of feminist and gender
research across the disciplines. Lewins Introduction is an act of recovery and reconnection. It
takes a genealogical approach that contextualizes
and positions the contributions made by a numerous groups of anthropologists in the United States
and Europe that led to what is now called feminist
anthropology. Ellen Lewin recognizes the relevance of positioning the work of marginalized
scholars of old in this context for continuity purposes and for understanding gender in its most
varied forms. Despite the inclusive referencing to
Black foremothers and citing Black feminist
anthropologists in the introductions and indices
there is but one chapter written by an African
American feminist anthropologist, Paulla Ebron,
whereas Afro-Surinamese Gloria Wekker oers
the African Diaspora contribution.
The point still remains clear, as revealed in the
review of six important texts in feminist anthropology that even though African American feminist
anthropologists publish, their works fail to be adequately recognized and cited by anthropologists,
including those who count as allies and colleagues.
The verication of the merit of the workthe citations that references to the original workis
absent in the majority of those six inuential texts.
Anthropologists, like other scholars cite authors
whose opinions they concur with, or are of use
value to them in their research. This is a practice
learned in graduate training. Renato Rosaldo
(1989) notes that the site of canon formation is in
the history of theory course. In that setting, graduate students learn who is good, become skilled at
presenting evidence to the contrary, and become
critical in their analysis of methodology, theory,
and other aspects of research and scholarship.

Without exposure, there is no scholarly location to

provide evidence for assessment.
A quick perusal of a combination of graduate
course syllabi posted on the web gives a hint at the
absence of Black anthropological thought and
specically of Black feminist contributions to the discipline in this critical course. This was a totally unscientic exercise, but it does illustrate my point. There
are two graduate syllabi found under a Google
search for syllabus for history of anthropology theory. Retrieved are two highly ranked departments,
Michigan (sitemaker.umich.edu/historymatters//
core_seminar_nal.doc; Cohen et al. 2005) and Rutgers (anthro.rutgers.edu/component/docman/doc
/305-505mascia-lees2008). Both syllabi paid good
attention to feminist anthropology. Black anthropologist and historian of the discipline, Lee Baker,
and theoretician Michel Rolph Trouillot were found
on these graduate syllabi. However, none of the syllabi cited the scholarship of any Black woman
anthropologist. In the United States, there are 83
departments of anthropology that oer the doctorate. These two cases do not make a case of precedence, but they do direct our attention toward the
practices of exclusion.
Citation indices are an important source for
documenting the dierential rates of citation of
anthropologists, including feminist anthropologists. By and far, anthropologists of color, especially those of African descent, have been out of
this citation loop. As mentioned earlier, African
American feminist anthropologists tend to cite
each other, particularly in similar subelds, but
often their contributions to the wider eld are not
recognizedvirtually absent. If the citation wars
have meaning in the modern academy, as Lutz
and others who have carried out similar research
claim, then in both short and long runs African
American scholars are/will be faceless and voiceless in the anthropological record.
In the US academy, the citation count is used
as an essential mechanism to do three things for
scholars: they render respect within the community
of anthropologists, provide recognition of productive contributions (writing) which then leads to
prominence in the eld and the academy at large.
A central part of academic writing is citationthe
evaluation of the written work of others. Lutz
states, To engage in scholarship is to involve oneself with the ideas of others, to attempt to support,
amend, or overturn them, but rst of all to take
them under consideration. The citation is an index
of a judgment made by an anthropologist of the
article in which the citation appears, that the

persons cited has been taken seriously. Citations

implicate relations of power, both based on race
and gender, and form of symbolic capital, for the
cited author, as scholarly status or reputation
depends, in part, on the frequency. Citation capital
can be transformed not only into respect, recognition, and prominence but also into real capital in
the form of higher salaries and merit pay, even for
those whose institutions that are in nancial
distress.
I examined data from the 2001 Social Web
focusing on 15 Black women anthropologists
featured in Irma McClaurins 2001 Introduction
to Black Feminist Anthropology.4 The Social Web
categorizes journals and authors under headings,
such as education, race, history, and area studies
(e.g., Latin American Perspectives); anthropology,
sociology, the social and behavioral sciences, and
law reviews; and feminist studies. Overall, there
were 409 citations considered. Not unexpectedly,
the two former presidents of institutions of higher
education, Johnnetta B. Cole and Yolanda T.
Moses, were cited in two-thirds of the listings in
education (N = 27). Legal scholars, along with
social science medicine, nursing, sociology, and
psychology showed signicant numbers (N = 128)
citing the work of Black feminist anthropologists
on issues of gender and race. Area studies and history journals noted (N = 67) citations across the
two headings. The category with the least number
of references of Black feminist anthropologists was
in feminist journals (N = 34). Furthermore, most
of the authors who referenced Black feminist
anthropologists were themselves, Black women
anthropologists. Of the 153 citations in anthropology journals, 40 percent resulted from two
authors, Faye Harrison and Audrey Smedley. The
numbers came from two pieces of work, Harrisons review in the Annual Review of Anthropology
(1995) and Smedleys text Race in North America
(1993). Again the majority of scholars citing these
works were indeed other Black anthropologists,
both women and men and their allies.
Another example of how recognition in the
eld works is the volume Gender and Anthropology
by Frances Mascia-Lees and Nancy Johnson Black
(2000). After telling their stories of how they
became college-educated women, how they found
anthropology and other self-reexive positions, the
authors render a history of feminist anthropology.
Reclaiming foremothers was an important part of
this eort. Mascia-Lees and Black mention the
reclaiming of Zora Neale Hurston as a foremother
of feminist anthropology, but do not cite Black
Lynn Bolles

67

feminist anthropologist Gwendolyn Mikell whose

writings addresses Hurston in the discipline (1999).
The authors frame Hurston as a novelist, essayist,
and playwright but not as a Boasian anthropologist. It is not that the artist stance is incorrect, but
that Hurston is not put in a comparative position
with the other anthropologists on the authors
foremother reclamation list.
In a chapter on womens social organization
that challenges male dominance, Mascia-Lees and
Black cite Irma McClaurins 1995 ethnography on
Belize, and mention Faye Harrison in the bibliography. Chapter eight examines the reexive
approach, and notes (2000:93) that the roots of
these eorts began when many African Americans began to associate their own oppression with
that of Black Africans ghting colonial domination in other parts of the world and fueled the US
civil rights movement. Here there is an implication of familiarity with 1960s Black activism without a Black intellectual history as a foundation.
Exotic at Home (1998) by Michaela di Leonardo comes close to giving Black feminist anthropology credit. In the chapter entitled, The Dusky
Maiden and the Post war American Imperium Di
Leonardo spends a good deal of time on Margaret
Mead, virtually a mother gure of anthropology. According to Di Leonardo none of Meads
biographies are critical of her work or life except
for Leonora Forestal and Angela Gilliams text,
Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy (1992).
With that citation, Di Leonardo does not even
examine the work for further comments, which
implies that their work is not worthy of exploring.
HIRING AND TENURE
Beyond the initial struggle to get hired, there is
also the struggle to get tenure. The following are a
few tenure stories that will help to reinforce why
decolonizing must begin at home. I cannot identify
the scholars whose stories are repeated here
because the sources were gathered around the
intellectual watercooler. Nonetheless, every story
told about the tenure process has a message and
conveys a lesson that needs to be learned by all.
By the early 1970s, a sizable cohort of Black
women anthropologists came of age. This number
doubled the number of Black women in the eld5.
They received their doctorates from prestigious
graduate programs, and often their advisors made
very little eort to help make their entry into the
profession uneventful. For many of them, there
was no old boy networking, no old girl networking on their behalf. Nonetheless, on their own
68

Transforming Anthropology

VOL. 21(1)

merit, other prestigious universities hired them.

Doing what junior faculty do, these women did
more so because they were Black activist/scholars.
Three with prestigious credentials were all turned
down for tenure. Between them, there were ve
books, and an ample number of articles. Each case
was resolved; one changed jobs and the other two
had their decisions reversed after massive lobbying
eorts by the senior Black anthropological community. None of the cases acquired the notoriety
of the Lamphere et al. vs. Brown decision because
they never reached litigation stage.
In one promotion and tenure case, one department solicited and received 50 letters from senior
scholars. One senior woman reviewer remarked
that she already knew the manuscript included in
the tenure packet because Cambridge University
Press had sent the book in its dissertation form
for her evaluation for publication. She wrote a letter for tenure based on that reading. The interesting part is that the junior scholar up for tenure
never submitted a manuscript to Cambridge.
Therefore, the letter used in consideration for her
promotion and tenure was based on somebody
elses book. The actual author of the Cambridge
submission was also a young Black woman
anthropologist who was also coming up for tenure
at another prestigious institution. Clearly, this
senior woman reviewer could not tell one Black
woman anthropologist a part from another. The
young Black woman did not receive tenure at that
institution. The woman who was caught in the
confusion did not pursue the process, left academics and the country. In personal conversations
with three of these women they remarked on feelings of isolation, second-class citizenship, and
being overburdened with student responsibilities.
Black women who continue in the academy
are often pressed to show their allegiance to at
least two other elds of studyAfrican American/
Africana/Black Studies, Womens Studies, and
whatever is their subeld. All of those constituencies claim possession of time, energy, and ideas.
There is the doubling up of students and the college/university committees that need the doubledip point of view. In the past, when book manuscripts were produced it is hard to nd a publisher
willing to take a chance, especially if the contents were on Black subject matter. It was assumed
that the audience would be too specialized or
too small and not worth the investment, particularly for university presses or even trade publishing
houses. Foremother Black anthropologist Irene
Diggs recalled with great bitterness that she sent

her manuscripts out to countless numbers of publishers, but no one was interested even in her life
history of the seminal Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz. Even today when the rejection letters
arrive, it is either straight to the point, or it
includes the readers comments. Here, academics
enjoy being rather viscous. A reviewer for a
recently rejected manuscript on anthropology,
racism and the academy implied on how could a
well-respected (read White) feminist scholar be
associated with such ridiculous ideas and worthless
scholarship.
When the work is nally published the publisher becomes a cause for concern, especially for
consideration for tenure and promotion. This policy is repeated in the evaluation of journals. Even
though Transforming Anthropology is a referred
journal, published under the auspices of the American Anthropological Association, an institution
engaged in a debate whether or not considered in
a Black scholars promotion and tenure le.
CONCLUSION
The goal of Telling the Story Straight was to
address the omissions, the exclusions, and extra
burdens faced by Black feminist anthropologists
who, as Langston Hughes reminds us, are Black
and beautiful. White privilege permeates the very
fabric of U.S. society and is found in the personal
and politics of anthropologists and in the academy.
Without understanding this fundamental aspect of
U.S. culture and society, the eorts of decolonizing
feminist anthropology, entails doing homework in
every eld of endeavor, particularly at home, in the
oce, and at the university. There must be broad
transformative practice of inclusion in hiring, earning tenure, inviting contributors on annual meeting
sessions and in editing collections, reviewing processes, and in the practice of citation. When these
eorts are in place in ones mind and actualized in
practice then we can all move forward to a more
equitable place. As of 2011, there were approximately a dozen Black women anthropologists who
hold the rank of full professor. The academy, as a
reection of society, is not a crystal staircase for
women, especially if they are non-White. Naturally
there are exceptions and they have their own stories to tell. Included in the group are those who
not only achieved the highest level in the academy
but also maintained that stature, such as Johnnetta
B. Cole, Claudia Mitchell Kernan, Yolanda T.
Moses, and Leith Mullings.
A number of years ago, after presenting a
paper at Barnard College, a senior colleague asked

if I realized that most of the research I discussed

was by Black women anthropologists? The reply
was yes, as most do not recognize their existence,
somebody has to do it. My colleague, who is a
supporter, thought the answer was a bit ippant,
but in fact it was the truth.
Consider this a challenge to young scholars.
Expand your list of whom you cite on a particular
topic and the politics of that decision. Black
women anthropologists are productive and are in
need of all the support they can garner by their
peers and colleagues. If feminist anthropology is
going to learn from the past, it must maintain a
constant vigilance of the process. The cost of not
doing so continues the practice of miseducation
and omission in the eld and the invisibility of
Black womens intellectual thought in the eld of
anthropology.

Lynn Bolles Womens Studies, University of

Maryland College Park, 2101 Woods Hall,
College
Park,
Maryland,
20742,
USA;
lbolles@umd.edu

NOTES
1. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers,
Cheryl Mwaria, Alaka Wali, Karen Brodkin, and
my Sister Black Women Anthropologists, especially the ancestors.
2. www.aaanet.org/about/Governance/committees-commissions.cfm.
3. The Department of Anthropology at Howard University, a Historical Black College/University (HBCU) was targeted for elimination in 2011.
4. Research on citation by and on Black
women anthropologists using the Social Web as a
primary source is an aspect of new project.
5. Among this group are Leith Mullings,
Gwendolyn Mikell, Sheila Walker, Patricia Guthrie, Carolyn Martin Shaw, Yolanda Moses, Susan
Brown, Yvonne Jones, and Victoria Durant
Gonzalez.
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Supporting Information
Additional Supporting Information may be
found in the online version of this article:
Appendix S1. List of Ph.D. Black Women
Anthropologists in the Academy 12/12 Unocial.

Lynn Bolles

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