For James McCune Smith, Racism Was All Over AnthropologyPosted in Anthropology, Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive on 2021-08-18 01:13Z by Steven |
For James McCune Smith, Racism Was All Over Anthropology
JSTOR Daily
2021-08-11
Livia Gershon
Nashua, New Hampshire
 James McCune Smith via Wikimedia Commons/Jonathan Aprea |
What if the creation story of anthropology isn’t exclusively about white men classifying people as primitive?
In the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals working in the nascent field of anthropology sought to divide humanity into more and less civilized races, debating whether these differences were due to biology or deep-seated cultural patterns. At least that’s what Americans today tend to remember about the early days of the discipline. But, anthropologist Thomas C. Patterson writes, that may be because historians studying anthropology have selectively ignored other viewpoints within the field. To counteract this tendency, Patterson invites us to learn about the Black anthropologist James McCune Smith.
McCune Smith was born enslaved in New York City. He became legally free as a teenager in 1827 under New York state’s Emancipation Act. He apprenticed as a blacksmith while studying Latin and Greek. Denied admission to Columbia University because of his race, he attended the University of Glasgow and went on to become a medical doctor…
Read the entire article here.