Category Archives: #Ferguson & Elsewhere

Coverage & Commentary on events in #Ferguson and other related issues

#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Blotter, Secularism & Security after Charlie Hebdo

Anthropoliteia in American Anthropologist’s review of Public Anthropology

In the most recent (September) issue of American Anthropologist, Angelique Haugerud has an excellent review of “Public Anthropology in 2015” which features both our series “#Ferguson & Elsewhere” and “Secularism & Security after Charlie Hebdo” in addition to various pieces by many former contributors (including myself, Orisanmi Burton, Paul Mutsaers, Jennie Simpson, A. Lynn Bolles, Bradley Dunseith, Michelle Stewart, Dylan Kerrigan, Didier Fassin, and Laurence Ralph)

Unfortunately it’s currently behind a paywall, but those of you with institutional access should check it out!

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Blotter

So wait, are there racial disparities in US policing or not? (Answer: YES!)

If you’re like me, you may have had two academic articles with seemingly conflicting arguments run through your Facebook feed lately.  The first, an article by Cody T. Ross published via PLOS ONE uses a multi-level Bayesian analysis to conclude that there exists

evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average

The other, written by economist Roland G. Fryer and covered extensively in the New York Times Upshot column, concludes that in the case of “the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”

How can such diametrically opposed claims be made simultaneously in reputable scientific journals?  While much of these claims seems to rest in a domain of advanced statistics with which anthropologists typically feel less confident, the key to understanding their different claims actually might depend on a more “ethnographic” sense of the data sets they build upon.

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere

Mitch Henriquez: Death by cop in the epicenter of global justice – and the virtues of (hashtag) activism

The Editors of Anthropoliteia would like to welcome Paul Mutsaers with the latest entry in our ongoing Forum, #Ferguson and Elsewhere

 

He had come to the Netherlands for a family visit, the Aruban Mitch Henriquez. On Saturday the 27th of June he enjoyed a UB40 concert at Night at the Park in The Hague. Ostensibly, he had shouted that he had a “gun” in his pocket, which according to some bystanders was a joke: in a Caribbean context “gun” can refer to an impressive penis. The police responded and attempted to bring him into custody and later declared that he had resisted his arrest. Preliminary results from the autopsy now indicate that Henriquez died of asphyxiation after being held in a chokehold and being crushed by five white officers who sat on his body. The national department of criminal investigation has now ruled out that he had a gun. Nor had he used drugs or too much alcohol, according to the toxicology report.

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Dossiers

The Lost Space of Dissent: Amidst Charleston’s Unity

The Editors of Anthropoliteia welcome Bradley Dunseith with a report from Charleston, South Carolina

Knights of Columbus hall in Charleston, South Carolina. June 2015. Photo by Bradley Dunseith CC BY-NC-PSA 4.0

As I walked towards the Mother Emmanuel Church I found myself counting every step I took, part of me didn’t want to arrive. On June 19th I took a morning bus to Charleston, South Carolina, two days after a self-described white supremacist walked into the historic black church of AME Mother Emmanuel and, after sitting in for an hour of bible study, murdered nine black churchgoers. Reverend and Senator Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Reverend Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Reverend and Doctor Daniel L Simmons Sr., Ethel Lance, Myra Thompson, and Susie Jackson were gunned down on the evening of June 17, 2015. The shooter was able to reload five times during the attack, prompting gun rights activists and some black faith communities to argue that having a firearm within the church’s premise could have prevented the attack, while President Obama spoke in the immediate aftermath, saying that “once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Interrogations

A. Lynn Bolles on Political Action at the 2014 American Anthropological Association Meeting

Here at Anthropoliteia we’re always looking for new ways to explore new technologies to broaden the discussion on police, security, law and punishment from global and anthropological perspectives.  In this vein, the Editors are happy to announce a new (semi) regular series of video conversations that we’re calling Interrogations.  Although the series will be edited by Kristen Drybread and Johanna Rohmer, this first episode was moderated by our General Editor, Kevin Karpiak.

This first conversation consists of a discussion with Dr. A. Lynn Bolles that begins with the events leading up to and occurring at the 2014 American Anthropological Association Meetings in Washington D.C. but traverses other issues in the anthropology of policing, including the specific challenges and opportunities anthropologists face in their intersecting roles as scholars, educators, and political subjects.

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere

Policing as a Well-Protected Craft

The editors of Anthropoliteia would like to welcome Peter K. Manning with the latest entry in our developing forum #Ferguson & Elsewhere
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#Ferguson & Elsewhere

Die-in Protest at the 2014 American Anthropological Association Meetings

Here at Anthropoliteia we have plans to continue the conversation we’ve already been engaged in, for example through our series #Ferguson & Elsewhere, around police, violence, justice and anthropology.  For now we would just like to share with you some images from today’s protest at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in Washington DC, courtesy of visual anthropologist Richard Freeman (whose work you can also find at visualquotations.com).  We welcome reactions, ideas and comments, either here, via our Open Forum or by contacting us directly at anthropoliteia@gmail.com.

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Announcements

Open Forum on #Ferguson and Elsewhere

Today at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, there was a Special Session on Ferguson and police brutality hosted. At the session, there was a voiced a general desire for a forum through which to discuss and move forward on the issue, as anthropologists.  Out of that meeting there were a series of actions, whose planning is in motion, but the Editors of Anthropoliteia would like to offer this space as a general forum open for discussion of the issue. We invite you to share your ideas below in the comments section

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Pedagogy

Anthropoliteia reacts to #Ferguson

It’s hard to know what exactly to say, to think, to feel or how to react at a time like this; even as a scholar of police.  Which is not to say that everything in the case is terribly ambiguous.  Quite the opposite: another young black man has been the victim of a deadly and unaccountable state violence in front of our very eyes.  I suppose the disorientation lay in how to move forward, and for that I have no strong answers.

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Having said that, several of us at Anthropolitiea have been active on Twitter, I imagine in an effort to make sense of exactly that existential question. This is not dissimilar to my own reaction during and after the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman affair.  Below are some of our thoughts, as we form them:

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, What's going on in Ukraine?

Monica Eppinger, one of the contributors to our Forum “What’s Going on in Ukraine?“, also happens to be Assistant Professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, which offers her a unique insight on one of our other recent Forums “#Ferguson and Elsewhere“.  Over at her other blog, the Comparative Law Prof Blog, she has some interesting reflections on the two.  Here’s just a snippet:

Serhiy Nigoyan memorial, Ukraine (c) Monica Eppinger 2014

Two commonalities invite comparison between late summer in Ferguson and deep winter in Kyiv.  First is the form of public action, street protest.  It speaks of an electorate that, despite a polity’s record of holding fair elections, resorts to alternatives to usual democratic processes.  The second, and most striking, commonality is the kind of spark that ignited protest, the relationship between citizen death at the hands of police and public assessments of state legitimacy.

via Comparative Law Prof Blog.

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