Generations of anthropologists have contested the discipline’s ties to colonial and extractive projects, both abroad and “at home.” For aspiring BIPOC and nontraditional researchers, extractive and exclusionary practices in their training are real, demonstrable, and harmful. In this article, I examine how hidden institutional scripts and omissions operate. Drawing from the tradition of testimonio, a political act of bearing witness to one’s experiences, while also examining institutional materials, I give a detailed account of how marginalized scholars continue to be impeded. My analysis proceeds in chronological order, starting with graduate training, then moving to look at the biases of funding and publishing norms, before returning to the matter of writing itself: why it holds such multilayered pain and how academic conventions can be challenged to everyone’s benefit.
Melinda González (Wed,) studied this question.