Race Equality Week 2022 Seminar: The Role of Anti-racism in Archaeology

In the United States, 2020 Race Uprisings and ongoing anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander violence has pushed many archaeologists to take a stand against racism. This has led to timely publications, online forums, and other forms of academic activism. At its core, racism is rooted in inequity and is perpetuated through trauma that affects us all in different ways. However, this is only slowly being realised by archaeologists in the United States.

This talk addresses how taking a trauma-informed approach to archaeological training has the potential to address archaeology’s role in structural racism. It also shows us a pathway toward helping us become anti-racists in our own lives, workplaces, and communities. I conclude with examples of archaeology projects in the United States that are working to realising the anti-racist praxis BIPOC people need. I argue that an anti-racist praxis can be one of the tools used to transform archaeology into a community asset.

About the speaker

William “Bill” White, III is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley where he specialises in historical archaeology of the African Diaspora, historic preservation, and community-based research. Born in Boise, Idaho, he completed his Bachelor’s in anthropology at Boise State University in 2001 and an anthropology Master’s at the University of Idaho in 2005. Since 2004, Bill has worked for environmental companies that took him to archaeology sites across the American West. His career in academia started while attending the University of Arizona where he worked for the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) as an archaeologist. Bill graduated completed his PhD at Arizona in 2017. His archaeological work also seeks to reach larger audiences by using blogging, vlogging, podcasting, and online publishing. He also employs local youth from under-served communities, specifically African Americans and Native Americans, in local archaeology projects. Bill currently resides in Hercules, California.

Bill is the co-author, along with Durham staff member Cathie Draycott, of the 2020 SAPIENS article, Why the Whiteness of Archaeology is a Problem: https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/archaeology-diversity/

For Bill’s work on CRM and field archaeology, see his site: Succinct Research