In demographic terms, anthropology in the United States continues to be dominated by white Americans. Consider this graph of the racial distribution of anthropology doctorates over the last twelve years (incidentally, the NSF had no data for 1999, so there should really be a gap year inserted here, but I trust you can all manage without one). The enormous top segment of this graph shows the very large fraction of new U.S. anthropology doctorates that go to white Americans. This decade, on average, 65.7% of new anthro phds were white. And yet we also observe that this dominance is falling, slowly, over the years; you can see that here visually. 75% of new anthropology doctorates went to whites in 1995 but only 63.6% in 2007. And other minority groups have grown, slightly, as demonstrated by the widening of those bands that indicate black Americans, Hispanics, and Asians (which includes Pacific Islanders in the NSF-supplied data I use). But racial equity is far from attained.

To really get a sense of these dynamics, it’s helpful to look at specific groups historically and to look at groups overall in proportion to their share of the U.S. population. Consider the following data for 2007:

What this table shows, interestingly enough, is that the proportion of white Americans declines as you look higher up the degree structure. That goes against a typical demographic principle of social hierarchy, according to which a more culturally dominant group is better represented at higher levels of the social scale. (We saw an excellent example of this in looking at gender in anthropology, earlier this fall — even though men are a minority of anthropologists, they are increasingly well represented at higher educational levels.) However, it seems in the data that the lower representation of whites at higher levels, like the doctoral level, should not necessarily be understood as a promising sign of racial equality. Rather, the dip in relative white dominance seems related to the huge number of foreign students who appear at the MA and above all at the PhD level, where they constitute the largest demographic bloc (16.57%) after American whites. Very few foreign students come here for anthropology BAs (1.36%), but they do seem to come here for, in essence, upper level professional training.

Distressingly, we can also see in this data that blacks and Hispanics (the two largest American minority groups) are radically underrepresented at all degree levels in proportion to their share of the population. And their presence in anthropology is not constant across degree levels: there is a noticeable drop between the fraction of blacks and Hispanics who get BAs and the fraction who get graduate degrees. Worth noting, on the other hand, that Asian-Americans and American Indians are quite well represented in proportion to their fairly small fraction of the American population. I tend to suspect that class is a hidden variable in the relative success of Asian-Americans, since they are (at least ostensibly) better off in the American class system, but the NSF’s national statistics are beautifully and outrageously silent on the question of students’ class origins. So that has to remain pure hypothesis for the time being.

To get a clearer image of the slow decline of general white dominance, you might consider this:

The overall pattern — where bachelors being the most white, doctorates relatively the least white, and masters are in the middle — appears to have been fairly constant throughout this data, in spite of the masters’ line fluctuating somewhat between the two. The overall spread seems fairly consistent; whatever sociological processes lead certain sets of white people to go into anthropology appears somewhat consistant. If we look at the situation for black Americans, however, we can see a strikingly different sociological picture:

This one I had to format in terms of absolute numbers instead of percentages, since at very low absolute numbers, small changes translate into large proportional changes and the graph becomes unreadable. But actually, I think it’s helpful to have the absolute numbers here. They serve to remind us that in the United States, a country with some 34 million black inhabitants, the discipline of anthropology, which ostensibly prides itself on its progressive understanding of race, is graduating barely two dozen black anthropologists per year. You can see it here with your own eyes: the PhD line in this graph is just barely halfway to the line that would mark 50. And the number of MAs is above that, but pretty similar. To depress you a little and bring the point home, if in 2004 there were 34,772,381 black Americans (per the Census data linked above), and the same year there were 26 new black anthropology PhDs, that works out to one new anthropology PhD for every 1,337,399 black Americans. By contrast there was in 2004 one new (white) anthropologist for every 551,183 white Americans — that’s more than twice as much, though of course still tiny. (Anthropology, I can’t stress enough, is still a tiny field in a large world.)

Now, it seems to me that a very interesting demographic phenomenon here, and a striking departure from the parallel lines on the graph of whites above, is the fact that black Americans are in fact growing quite substantially as a fraction of the anthropology bachelors’ population — the population has almost doubled since 1995 – and yet things seem to be changing very slowly at the doctoral level. Of course, there can be a time lag between these two lines — if more of group X suddenly get more BAs, it would still take that same group of new BAs most of a decade to get PhDs, if any of them want to — and yet I’m still struck by the extremely low numbers at the graduate level. Still talking about black anthropologists, then, one does notice a climb at the PhD level from 5-6 (total for the year) in 1995-6 to a couple of dozen on average this decade, but at the master’s level, things are about constant. As we know, affirmative action is not doing so well these days; and although we can guess that diversity fellowships play a role in the small increases we do see, it’s hard not to think that it’s radically insufficient.

(I guess this is the time to acknowledge that it’s possible that things are not as bad as they seem; the “unknown” category in this data is quite large (7-9% of all anthro degrees), far larger than the black or Hispanic category, and so I suppose it’s at least likely that there are greater numbers than get reported. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough yet to do a proper error analysis of this data.)

In lieu of a conclusion, let me just note that it would be good to look at racial statistics among American anthropologists at large, on the AAA membership, on graduate students (are there major race-related selection effects that function within graduate education? it seems quite possible)… I can’t do that now, but I would love to have thoughts on what else might be worth examining. Other disciplines? Other countries? But for the time being, I confess I find this set of data somewhat disheartening. There’s progress towards racial equity, but it’s slow, and not enough.

“Particularly after the first year, people in a graduate program are part of the profession, they’re part of the industry. They have exactly the same day-to-day concerns as I do: how do you manage teaching on the one hand, and getting your research done on the other, which is the central structure of the research university. That’s why I don’t really think of this as graduate training.”

“Even though obviously I’ve written and published more than they have, nonetheless I’m not in the position of simply teaching the course, reading what they write, and evaluating that. I’m putting my new writing on the table at the same time they are, and getting the feedback and arguments.”

So the idea is that, in humanities and social sciences, student work differs from faculty work more in degree than in kind, particularly for students who are teaching and doing research at once. A major realization for me has been that the distinction between “graduate students” and “faculty,” indeed the whole system of academic role classification, derives at least as much from economic and ideological forces as from any educational principle. For instance, it seems to be the case that universities like mine don’t have to pay payroll tax if they don’t classify graduate student teachers as employees. Or in my department, the rhetoric of “apprenticeship” can serve to justify various economic inequalities (why should all students get paid if they’re not working but only apprenticing?).

Denning also has an important, one could say a “materialist” analysis of the lack of radical potential in education:

“Most American leftists are Deweyite liberals when it comes to education: they think education changes minds and society, and the reason they teach is to teach critical skills that will change students. That has always seemed odd to me. Coming out of the Marxist tradition, and particularly out of Gramsci, I’ve always had a much more modest approach to teaching than most of my radical teaching colleagues. Teaching, and going to school, does not shape people’s ideas. People’s ideas are shaped by the material circumstances that they come out of, the material situations they find themselves in, by “making a living.” It’s not that people can’t change their minds and ideas—you’re not set by where your family came from or what you learned in your formative years, because you’ve got new challenges. You may come from a family with money and now you have no job, or vice-versa—a lot of things can happen. Moments of crisis change people’s thinking. As a teacher, I’m simply trying to give people some of the resources, the cultural commons, that may be useful when those moments of crisis hit. I’ve always thought that if anyone became a socialist after taking my class, well, they’d be a neoliberal next semester after taking somebody else’s class.”

So it’s treacherous to overvalue the potential of teaching to truly change students… which only emphasizes this important point: that teaching is not in itself a sufficient form of political involvement. But it’s still necessary even if not sufficient.