Love for My People

Some Reflections on Sheila Walker and Life-Affirming Anthropology

Bibliographic Data

ID3029352
AuthorsKrystal Strong (0000-0001-7977-3417, University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume28
Issue2
Pages125-126
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransforming Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1051-0559 • E-ISSN: 1548-7466
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1111/traa.12197
OpenAlexW3092739036
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited4

ORIGINAL ARTICLE Sheila S. Walker. 1991. “The Virtues of Positive Ethnocentrism: Some Reflections of an Afrocentric Anthropologist.” Transforming Anthropology 2(2): 23-26. https://doi.org/10.1525/tran.1991.2.2.23 I said I love being Black. I love the color of my skin, it's the skin that I'm in. I love the texture of my hair, and I rock it everywhere. I said I love being Black!11 The chant “I Love Being Black” is a popular call-and-response in Movement for Black Lives/Black Lives Matter protests, which is attributed to the Black Youth Project 100. A studio version is featured on BYP 100’s “The Black Joy Experience.” Black Youth Project 100 Choir. 2018. “I Love Being Black (Chant).” YouTube. October 18. Accessed July 26, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuxqmtaZ2G4&list=OLAK5uy_lezl9a_sSVUNmuQO4WUSEkGIHRkHoil3E&index=4 “I am ethnocentric. And I have absolutely no intention of ridding myself of my ethnocentrism because I like it.” (Walker 1991, 23) This declaration-to unapologetically love one’s community and one’s self-is the “life-affirming position” that anchors Sheila Walker’s “The Virtues of Positive Ethnocentrism: Some Reflections of an Afrocentric Anthropologist.” The short essay begins with Walker recounting a university seminar organized around the theme of “Ending Ethnocentrism,” during which her white colleagues conflate Eurocentrism’s “long and consistent history of oppressing others” with Walker’s defense of the “positive ethnocentrism” of Black folks, who choose to center our kinfolk in our lives and labors. As Walker makes plain, professional encounters of this sort are more injurious than colleagues being “honestly unable to comprehend” the distinction between white supremacy and identifying with and having love for one’s people. Re-centering whiteness in the process of redressing its innumerable violences disregards the “beingness” of non-white people: “It essentially denies who I am, and even denies me the right to define who I am” (Walker 1991, 23). As higher education undergoes its latest reckoning with (its own) white supremacy, Walker’s reflections still read as provocatively as they did thirty years ago. In this moment, national uprisings persist in their demands for police abolition. A growing number of campus abolitionist formations are interrogating universities’ ongoing harms against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities through policing, prison investment, gentrification, and labor exploitation. And yet, the responses of campus leaders to these demands for justice have been overwhelmingly “toothless” solidarity statements,33 Englad, Jason, and Richard Purcell. 2020. “Higher Ed’s Toothless Response to the Killing of George Floyd.” Chronicle of Higher Education website, June 8. Accessed July 26, 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-eds-toothless-response-to-the-killing-of-george-floyd. virtual townhalls, anti-racist booklists, and high-level diversity and inclusion appointments. These measures make a teachable moment out of struggles for radical transformation of the material conditions of Black suffering. They are the neoliberal manifestations of Walker’s principled critique of those individuals and institutions who do “not want to see themselves as implicated” in white supremacy also being the ones who are able to conspicuously position themselves as “working to end” the oppressive structures “of which they are beneficiaries both materially and psychologically” (Walker 1991, 24-25). Walker’s essay and the fiercely self-possessed example of her intellectual journey urges us to consider what is life-affirming-or not-about the circumstances, praxis, and imagination of Black Anthropology in a time of global Black rebellion.44 Sheila Walker’s 2015 article, “Milestones and Arrows: A Cultural Anthropologist Discovers the Global African Diaspora,” is a generous self-retrospective on a professional life well lived. In her 1978 essay that introduces a special issue on Black Education, “A Challenge to Anthropology and Education,” Walker uplifts the contributions of a multigenerational group of Black scholars, who do not all define themselves as anthropologists but make use of anthropological tools, guided by the “faith” that anthropology has “relevance to the liberation of Black people from the devastating consequences of over four centuries of white racism” (Drake, quoted in Walker 1978, 76). As an anthropologist and organizer who was both radicalized and professionalized in the wake of spectacular Black deaths and the ongoing Movement for Black Lives, what I find most generative in this essay is Walker’s insistence that “there is fertile ground for anthropologists to plow that really needs plowing” (Walker 1978, 83). I understand this statement to be an invitation to re-center the goals of Black liberation in Black scholarship, to interrogate the question of what it is that anthropology can materially do for Black people (if anything), and, returning to “The Virtues of Positive Ethnocentrism,” to audaciously love our folks out loud. In two months of quarantine and another two months in the streets, the most hopeful I have felt about the prospects of Black freedom was in those jubilant moments shouting “I love being Black.” Black people are dying, slowly and quickly. We are also always struggling, surviving, loving, and creating the new worlds we envision. As Walker’s scholarship continues to teach us, to be positively ethnocentric, to be one who “gratefully and ecstatically participates in [the] many manifestations of that cultural orientation,” is and must be joyful self-determining kin-work (Walker 1991, 24). To imagine oneself as contributing to the liberatory struggles of one’s people is and must be an act of pleasure. To like it, to love it, to be pleased by it, is enough

Art · Art history · Ethnocentrism · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Gender Studies

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