Is anthropology a legitimate “science”? Or is anthropology more like history? A personalised interpretation of data, where the things we see are often merely the things others choose to reveal? Or perhaps the things we were looking for in the first place? What true inferences can be drawn from studying the cultural behaviours of […]
“Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.” Mark Twain The family tree of virtually every American family descended from “non-elites” is riven with mysteries, questions, dead ends, and dubious claims of lineage. By “non-elite”, we mean people with little access to […]
1929. Imagine being born into a dirt-poor Shawnee family in North Carolina in the first year of the Great Depression. Imagine getting sent away to fight in Korea at the age of 21, where you manage to contract tuberculosis. Imagine having a lung removed in your 20s, and being told that you will never sing […]
There is a meme seen on social media, showing a large deer in the middle of a road enclosed by woods. Under the photo are the words “The deer is not crossing the road. A road is crossing his forest.” I often come back to this idea when considering American history. What we are reading, […]
Dorothea Lange’s photographic series “Migrant Woman” is easily THE most recognised series of iconic images documenting/representing the misery of the Great Depression in Dustbowl Oklahoma – the people written about with great compassion by John Steinbeck in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. What few realise, is that the woman in this series of photographs […]
In the USA, “self identity” is a privilege often enjoyed only by those people with access to the levers of power. Property. Money. Education. Social connections. Weapons. The right skin colour. A man called J. D. Vance (his own name the product of a selected identity) wrote a book four years ago at the ripe […]
The map on the left was compiled during the Civil War era. The map on the right is the recent result of Google Analytics data. Most people inclined to think about it have always seen the Civil War in terms of a simple North/South divide. The literary-minded among us grew up aware of The […]
The concept of “race” can be viewed from opposite ends of a long spectrum. At one end are scientists and geneticists, who do not recognise the existence of separate “races” at all. At the other end are racists. In common parlance, “racist” has come to simply mean a person who hates other people based […]
Copyright © 2023 Brian Halpin – Before We Were White
Subscribe to our mailchimp newsletter to receive our latest news and podcasts straight to your inbox.
