The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Reflections on A. Lynn Bolles's “Telling the Story Straight”

In these troubling and unprecedented times of a global pandemic and epidemic of police violence and misconduct that are simultaneously ravaging Black lives all over the world, it is important to reflect on the impact of A. Lynn Bolles’s 2013 article, “Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Intellectual Thought in Anthropology.” Not only did this ground-breaking article have a profound impact on a whole generation of Black feminist anthropologists, but it also paved the way for the #CiteBlackWomen movement. In this article, Bolles emphasizes the need for Black women anthropologists to be “heard, recognized, and valued in terms of their contributions to anthropology and to women and gender studies” (57). She outlines three major problems that have plagued Black women anthropologists: (1) their scholarship is excluded from the canon of anthropology by white feminist anthropologists due to white privilege; (2) they are expected to provide more institutional service, advising, and mentoring than their white counterparts; and (3) their work is often geared more toward activism, which is “not rewarded by the academy’s scheme of what ‘counts’ as scholarly production” (64). This sad state of affairs is even worse when one considers that white women—who make up the majority of the American Anthropological Association’s membership—often do research that focuses on inequalities in various parts of the world, yet they seem unphased by the inequalities that they perpetuate in the discipline with their Black women colleagues. Ultimately, as I reflect on the impact of this article as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), I am struck by how, as the old adage goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Black women scholars who want to reach beyond the ivory tower must take on the double duty of producing their scholarship for both popular audiences and the academy. Although this does constitute extra labor, it also means that Black feminist anthropologists are leading the way in terms of doing public, engaged anthropology that connects with a wider interdisciplinary audience. Bolles points out that even when Black feminist anthropologists do publish, “their works fail to be adequately recognized and cited by anthropologists, including those who count as allies and colleagues” (66). The fact that we cannot even count on our allies and colleagues to cite us is what hurts the most. Bolles provides evidence for this claim by assessing foundational volumes in feminist anthropology in terms of their inclusion of Black feminist anthropologists. Initially, Bolles said that there was only one Black woman contributor between the two volumes, Toward an Anthropology of Women (Rapp 1975) and Women, Culture and Society (Lamphere and Rosaldo 1974). However, in personal conversation before our Cite Black Women Roundtable at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in 2018, Bolles said that she was mistaken and that Susan E. Brown was actually not a Black woman! Later volumes (di Leonardo 1991; Lewin 2006; Morgen 1989; Ragone and Zavella 1997) included between zero and three Black women anthropologist authors. Not only are our allies and colleagues not including us in edited volumes, but they are also not teaching our work. Bolles reviewed syllabi from top anthropology departments and found that texts by Black women anthropologists were woefully under-represented in course readings (67). Having spent the past ten years teaching at a historically Black college for women, I have been fortunate to be in a place where we can center Black women authors in our anthropology courses. However, in looking at anthropology course syllabi at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) today, one would still find an under-representation of Black women authors. It is not enough just to add one reading by Zora Neale Hurston and think that the work is done! Bolles makes the important point that “citations implicate relations of power” (67). Moreover, she demonstrates how “citation capital can be transformed not only into respect, recognition, and prominence but also into real capital in the form of higher salaries and merit pay” (67). We can see this in tenure and promotion reviews, in which citation indexes are looked to as evidence of the impact of one’s scholarship. Bolles also reflects