The Abandoned Intersection: Race and Class and the Diversification of Archaeology’s Ranks

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists are quick to connect race and class in conversations about the dead. However, in our discussions of the living—especially on BIPOC archaeologists and their work—class takes a backseat to race, an outcome I call “wealth blindness.” I argue that, as professional archaeologists working to diversify our ranks, we owe it to our descendant constituencies, students of color, and BIPOC colleagues to re-couple wealth and race. I further argue that the rhetoric of Community Cultural Wealth (CCW), despite its well-deserved reputation for spurring equity in student and professional success, sometimes serves inadvertently to encourage wealth blindness among us. CCW’s theorization often obscures wealth gaps between those BIPOC populations that successfully break into archaeology and those that never attempt it in the first place, despite population-wide interest. I present anecdotal evidence to support these points, offering narrative fragments from my own experience as a hood-raised Latinx archaeologist and formerly incarcerated high school dropout. In doing so, I hope to encourage my colleagues to dedicate time and resources to rerouting BIPOC school-to-prison pipelines toward our field and to opening their eyes to wealth in the recruitment of BIPOC archaeology prospects at all levels.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39818.0