anthro in the news 6/22/15

• Hate in America

In the wake of the shooting in Charleston, many wonder what drives a person to commit a hate crime and whether hate groups have influence.  WROC Rochester carried an article about hate crimes and its study in the U.S. It notes the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) which researches hate groups in the U.S. According to the SPLC, there are 784 active and organized hate groups across the country. The article quotes anthropology professor Thomas Gibson of the University of Rochester who studies hate crimes in the U.S. and abroad:

“People who have grown up in a condition of privilege and feel that slipping away, they’re the most likely recruits for hate groups…In a way the rise of social media and the way people’s extreme views can get reinforced by someone just sitting alone in a basement, I think is a cause for more concern perhaps than the organized groups.” Gibson says the patches seen in a photo of the Charleston shooting suspect, represent the past racial apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and a connection to supremacist ideologies that could easily be bolstered online. “People who might for whatever personal reasons nurture certain grudges can now find like-minded individuals all over the country or even all over the world.”

• Beyond black and white: Transracial identity

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald addressed the question of racial identity as brought to popular attention in the case of Rachel Dolezal, who has chosen to live as a black woman. It quotes Farida Fozdar, associate professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Western Australia. The Dolezal case, she says, is complex:  “It reminds us of the US’s one-drop rule, which for so long meant that anyone with one drop of African-American blood was classified as African American…Since then, we’ve become much more constructivist about it, to the point that ethnic identity is seen as being about self-identification. But no one ever thought that meant that a white person with no black heritage, but black friends and family, can claim to be black. We’ve had the idea of ‘passing’ for a long time, but it has always meant people of black heritage ‘passing’ as white, in order to improve their life chances. So this is an interesting counterpoint.”