In this chapter, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in Brazil – and the expanding nature of the fundamentally anti-Black economy of violability that explains this country’s astonishing level of homicidal violence against Black and non-Black individuals living in predominantly Black spaces – but instead on the critical role that urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the “war on police” and advancing an insurgent intellectual movement that pushes toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has seen a proliferation of anthropological studies on police violence and police culture within the last few decades. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of ethnography’s techniques – in their attempts to provide “privileged” accounts of police praxis.

Our goal in this chapter is to consider the impact of our “Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition” theoretical proposition and lay out a possible roadmap for future ethnographic research to further develop the concept’s material and social analytical value. We approach this goal in three main substantive sections. The first provides an overview of our 2015 theoretical proposition on “racializing affect,” considering its main contributions and cornerstones. In the second section, we show how this theoretical intervention has influenced scholarship on an array of themes, including and transcending the specific intersection of affect and race in our original 2015 analysis. We do this through a systematic review of selected scholarly engagements with the piece accessed via its citational record available through Current Anthropology and Google scholar. Finally, we engage in a critical reappraisal of how discussions around “racialized affect” have expanded in anthropology and the humanistic social sciences more broadly, particularly in relation to ethnography as methodology.

This chapter presents biological anthropology’s contribution to racial science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to the anthropological study of documented skeletal collections. Examples of research before and after the discipline’s turn away from racial typology illustrate that the process did not occur in a linear fashion. The chapter ends with an overview of contemporary approaches to studying the lived experiences of people whose remains are in documented skeletal collections.

This chapter is concerned with the question of what whiteness means today. Looking both at history and at Christian nationalism allows us to see that for much of its history, whiteness in the US meant respectable family values. European immigrants were promised the privilege of whiteness for the cost of assimilation, for leaving ethnic markers of clothing and language behind and assimilating into white cultural norms around family and gender roles. While today we tend to discuss respectability politics around people of color attempting to challenge racial stereotypes by practicing white middle-class norms, this discussion shows that Christian nationalism also functions to defend respectability in the form of sexual and familial norms. This commitment to defending respectability is a product of the history of US nationalism and perpetuates a politics of whiteness without ever needing to explicitly say so.

This chapter strives to provide an account of what I call the Boasian intervention on race and racism that both acknowledges its importance and innovations as a (liberal) anti-racist project and critically highlights contradictory aspects of that project, particularly with regard to its analysis and representation of racism and whiteness in the United States. The first part summarizes how Franz Boas and his students contested discourses of biological determinism and scientific racism via transformations in discourses of race and culture. The second, more extensive, part focuses largely on selected works of Boas and Ruth Benedict and critically examines how their reinvention of race and representations of “race problems” in the US had different implications for European immigrants, who could become absorbed into the whiteness of American identity, and people of color, who could not.

In this chapter, I detail the racial logics of the Anthropocene in its current discursive formation, focusing on three related critiques of the term. First, I show how the Anthropocene logic is derived from the categorization impulse of the geosciences, an epistemic push that has close ties to histories of racial science. A critical reading of geology has shown that the categorization of strata performs a similar pedagogy to the “family tree of man.” Second, this categorization is framed by the progressive narrative of modernity. In the Anthropocene, as an often apocalyptic narrative, the whiteness of historical time shows through and privileges a “colorblind” lens for the Anthropocene. Third, the objective description of the Anthropocene presents a universalizing narrative, one that has trouble detailing the differential experiences of environmental impacts. This universality reifies race into the oncoming environmental crisis even as it attempts to celebrate a world without divisions and differences. Finally, I draw from the critiques of the Anthropocene to highlight the multiple stories that are being told of the geophysical, ecological, and societal changes.

This chapter focuses on blackface in Argentina, and on the larger implications embedded within the practice in that specific nation. The particularities of its use in the Argentine context are significant because of the country’s powerful nation-building mythology, which holds there are no Black people in the nation. Numerous scholarly investigations have demonstrated the consistent and sustained presence of Africans and Afrodescendants throughout the country’s history.

In this chapter, I analyze a genre of travel writing on Kuwait that has surged over the past decade. I specifically explore a series of self-published travelogues written by Western, white women who have previously taught in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education in Kuwait. These narratives, which are couched in white supremacist and eugenicist ideologies, offer insights into discourses of racialization and white superiority in Kuwait. I use these travelogues as a starting point to think about whiteness in Kuwait and its connection to global white supremacy. I argue that one needs to read these self-published travelogues as ethnographic data to understand how gendered race/whiteness (and white supremacy), as deployed in the self-reported experiences of Western, white traveloguers, plays out in various educational settings across Kuwait, a country that is not considered by anthropologists to be a fruitful site for ethnographic or racial inquiry.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.

Our starting point in this book is that across the globe, race – and its articulations with other forms of identification, ideology, and practice – remains one of the key conceptual tools to secure sociopolitical dominance, develop cultural politics of resistance, and engage in self-identification. Yet race opens up a major field of contradiction and misunderstanding. On the one hand, the ideas and practices of race that emerged with European expansion and colonization have impacted all modern societies – even as we should be sensitive to the particularity of histories and experiences in different places. On the other hand, the general accepted view is that there is no such thing as biological race; race is socially constructed, and its meanings are created for sociopolitical ends. Along with many others, we take the view that, while biological race is not “real,” “folk” ideas about it continue to proliferate as if race were natural, shaping sociopolitical relations and cultural practices.