Beyond Racism: Some Opinions about Racialism and American Archaeology

• Published in: American Indian quarterly 2006-07, Vol.30 (3/4), p.461-485
• Main Authors: Roger Echo-Hawk, Zimmerman, Larry J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American culture; American Indians; Archaeology; Attitudes; Biodiversity; Biology; Closets; Computer Mediated Communication; Death; Essays; Humanity; Ideology; Land Settlement; Native Americans; Native North Americans; Nonfiction; Physical anthropology; Public television; Race; Racial Bias; Racism; Research Methodology; Scholarship; Skull; United States history; White people
• ISSN: 0095-182X; 1534-1828; 1534-1828
• DOI: 10.1353/aiq.2006.0021

The scrutiny of racism as a cultural practice is well established in scholarship and in American public discourse. The underlying problem of race itself is also a common topic in academic writings and is a matter of ever-increasing consensus in anthropology and biology. But the significance of race as an inherently flawed interpretation of human biological diversity has yet to register in many realms of scholarship and in the public mind. In this essay, the authors seek to encourage the expansion of the public discussion of race beyond racism and toward the broader problem of race itself. They explicitly scrutinize how the ideology and practice of racialism affects American archaeology and the people it studies and contend that even though many archaeologists say that they accept the long-held anthropological view that race is biologically unsupportable, they still embrace racialism in their methods and thinking which has the typical result of confounding archaeological analysis related to issues of race. Taken from discussions on race by members of a Yahoo group, the Closet Chickens, that deserve wide public attention, the authors present pieces of the ensuing Closet Chicken discussion on race and American archaeology and examine key terms used in the discussions. (Contains 15 notes.)