Discriminations

Prof. John L. Jackson Jr., an anthropologist and newest member of the Chronicle of Higher Education panel of regulars on its “Brainstorm” blog (first and last encountered here and here), reports today on his participation on a race and religion panel at Harvard.

A good time was had by all. In fact, the intellectual exchange was so electrifying that Jackson writes that he

left the campus abuzz from all the challenging feedback provided by audience members and encouraged by the fact that Harvard’s Divinity School had even mounted such a provocative session at all.

I assume he means that he, and not the campus, was abuzz, but that buzzing, whoever was doing it, was actually one of his more charming expressions. Some of his other formulations, however, provide a small window into the less charming state of social science discourse these days.

The panel topic, “Theorizing Race and Ethnicity in Theology and the Study of Religion,” wasn’t really so bad. The practice of making a verb out of a noun and then letting it have an object is now so established and common as not to deserve comment. Similarly, one panelist’s “‘womanist’ position on race and contemporary cultural politics” was only to be expected. But, moving on, when we encounter another panelist’s “meticulous articulation of past and present scientific commitments to ideologically driven biologizations of race,” my own head starts to buzz.

Don’t you just love “biologizations”? Do linguists have a name for making a verb (biologize, or is it biologizize?) out of a noun and then turning that ersatz verb back into an even more ersatz noun? If they don’t, they should. Doing this sort of thing seems to be a common practice among the tribes of social scientists who live in isolated academic jungles and who, thanks to their isolation in those overgrown intellectual thickets, are free to create, amend, and preserve quaint word forms and expressions without any need to make themselves understood by outsiders.

Our Professor Jackson himself was also not immune to some amusing formulations. For example, in discussing his own project, “conducting ethnographic work on global Black Hebrewism,” he explains that

[t]here are many examples of African Americans’ investments in Hebrewism, dating back to the early 1600s. One of the most compelling contemporary instantiations of such a reckoning of Black Hebraic identity would be “The African Hebrews of Jerusalem,” a group that left the United States in 1967 and is currently thriving in Israel’s Negev region. My take on the emigrationist group spurred a productive discussion and debate.

Once again I have a problem with Prof. Jackson’s history (see here for my first problem). The idea that there even were any “African Americans” in “the early 1600s” is itself intriguing, inasmuch as there is no record of any blacks at all in the English colonies until 1619, when “20 and Odd” black Africans arrived in Jamestown.

As late as 1640, there were probably only 150 blacks in Virginia (the colony with the highest black population), and in 1650, 300.

And if they were not regarded simply as Africans, wouldn’t these black indentured servants (they were not slaves initially) have been “African Englishmen,” not “African Americans”? So far as I know there is no record of any Jews among that first bunch.

But for today’s purposes I’m less interested in historical accuracy than in Professor Jackson’s “compelling contemporary instantiations of such a reckoning.” For those of you who are curious, instantiation is a noun derived, however unnecessarily, from the verb instantiate.

Or is it the other way around?