The Geopolitics of Black Bones that Matter

By Kamari Maxine Clarke (University of Toronto)

This essay is part of a Vital Topics Forum on “Geopolitical Lives”

In May 2021, the remains of two Black teenagers—Tree and Delisha—were returned to their family after news broke about their misuse by biological anthropologists at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. In the wake of the news reports, debates ensued about how the remains had been obtained and about the academy’s entanglement in histories of colonialism, the devaluing of Black lives, and racism. In this short reflection, I explore the geopolitics of Black bones, arguing that racialized constructions of Blackness as placeless—as without history, family, human value, or connection to place—have informed and continue to inform the academy’s approach to “scientific” knowledge. This piece frames geopolitics as the domain in which place and politics come to be embodied and lived as race and Blackness. Tracing the geopolitical distancing techniques that turn Black bones into objects of anthropological knowledge, I show how geopolitical formations make racial ontologies. In doing so, I advocate for an approach to geopolitics that highlights how race is produced and reproduced at multiple scales through geopolitical mechanisms ranging from US empire and state violence to the discipline of anthropology.

In 1985, Delisha and Tree Africa lived in a communal housing settlement in West Philadelphia founded by the revolutionary organization MOVE—one of many Black-consciousness groups advocating for communal living and green politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Farmer 2017; Joseph 2006). Following anti-police-brutality protests by MOVE members and allegations that members had been seen with weapons, Philadelphia police surveilled and eventually encroached on the MOVE residence, leading to a shootout in which Officer James Ramp was killed. Nine MOVE members, including Tree Africa’s mother and both of Delisha’s parents, were convicted of Ramp’s murder, despite lingering questions concerning friendly fire (Pilkington 2018). Shortly afterwards, MOVE relocated to a different area of West Philadelphia.[1] Tree and Delisha’s parents were in prison in 1985 when police once again sought to evict MOVE. The city issued a search warrant, and police were sent to the MOVE compound. When members remained resistant to the warrant, police escalated with military-grade weapons, knowing there were children present. After a shootout, during which some members were trapped in the house, a helicopter dropped C4 explosives, starting a fire that spread rapidly through the MOVE compound. At the end of the onslaught, six adults and five children were dead, including Delisha, Tree, and Netta Africa.[2]

The surveillance apparatus combined with police militarization that killed eleven members of the MOVE family is part of a broader history of state surveillance of Black-empowerment organizations after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Such projects have gathered force from the past four hundred years: from histories of slavery and degradation; through convict labor, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration; to covert wars in Central America and Southern Africa. This history of racialized geopolitics—upheld by federal, state, and municipal laws and by international policies and extractive practices abroad, and carried out through social and political processes of surveillance and scrutiny—has had the effect of devaluing Black and Brown lives. Approaching geopolitics in a way that centers the logics of violence directed at Black and Brown lives alongside histories of scientific expendability, I demonstrate here how the politics of anti-Blackness are embedded in the logics of scientific distancing. In this example from the US context, we see how this has taken shape through the seeming banality of anthropological knowledge production.

Though the remains of most of the eleven deceased were returned to MOVE family members for burial, Tree’s and Delisha’s remains were held in the city morgue for more than six months. City officials sought the help of Professor Alan Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in identifying the badly burned remains, and Mann kept some of the girls’ bones at the Penn Museum until 2001, when he took a job at Princeton.[3] Unbeknownst to the Africa family, who believed the state had buried Delisha in 1986, Mann’s former student Professor Janet Monge took custody of the remains in 2016 following Mann’s retirement. She is said to have moved them back to the Penn Museum, and between 2016 and 2019 continued to try to identify age at death. During this period, Monge shuttled between Princeton and Penn, teaching biological anthropology classes in which she used the bones for case instruction.

In a video of a Princeton class in which she used Delisha and Tree Africa’s bones, Professor Monge appears with an undergraduate student, Jane Weiss, whom she describes as “the person who’s looked at [the bones] most carefully.” As the two prod the bones, they discuss with scientific detachment the ages of the people to whom they once belonged. “Fourteen or sixteen, right?” says Weiss. “More, you know, in the eighteen-plus kind of a category,” Monge suggests.[4] In response to the circulated video, Mike Africa, the surviving brother of Tree and Delisha, issued this statement to the press: “Nobody said you can do that, holding up their bones for the camera. That’s not how we process our dead. This is beyond words. The anthropology professor is holding the bones of a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother is still alive and grieving.”[5]

What can the geopolitics of race, the materiality of bones, and the mundane histories of objectification tell us about how structural violence continues to be spatially reproduced and politically and academically enabled? This reflection starts with a story about the performative labor that renders subjects as objects and the evisceration required to ontologically rearrange people as bones. Bones, of course, are not the only means through which the subject is disarticulated from the object of science. There is a well-documented history of scandal concerning the disregard for Indigenous and Black bodies, the unmarked graves and the multifarious forms of experimentation on Black people in the service of science and medicine (Doucet-Battle 2016; Washington 2006).[6] In biological anthropology, such histories are primarily traceable through skeletal remains. Bones, and the bodies that contain them, are polyvalent; they have been deployed as the matter of anthropological sciences through which predictive methods are used to understand both the past and the future. But bones also index human attachments and the relations that supersede life and death. They constitute community: they are the cultural proof of descent and therefore of kin and historical continuity. Mourning is also an act of bringing dead persons close. When loved ones die, we mourn them. We remember their contribution to our lives, our community, our personhood (Derrida 2003). But for Professor Monge, whose allegiance seemed aligned with the discipline and not necessarily to her deceased subjects, there is no connection to history and no relationships to mourn.

Anthropology’s historical entanglement with the objectification and use of Black and Brown bodies in the service of Western rationality required the disaggregation of the corpse from any sense of personhood or social relations. Through the disciplinary distancing of personhood, what emerges in the lab or in “the field” are processes of detachment of subjects from their personhood. This disaggregation is part of the culture of positivism that took shape within a renewed mid-century anthropology and manifested in practices ranging from the collection and possession of things—skulls, bones, implements—to the documentation of people, language, and cultural practices so dear to ethnographic and natural history museums. From histories of cultural and pedagogical objectification to scientific inquiry, the mattering of Black and Indigenous bones is one consequence of these practices and requires that we make sense of the history of the discipline through one of its critical entanglements. These logics, which emerged out of colonial conquest, have shaped a field in which colonial knowledge domains continue to structure what counts as anthropological knowledge and what is outside of it. In that regard, following Katherine McKittrick, one of the key ways in which anti-Blackness has functioned is by positing Blackness as perpetually out of place. As she writes, colonial racial economies had the effect of “sanctioning black placelessness,” viewing Black bodies as “those ‘without’—without legible Eurocentric history narratives, without land or home, without ownership of self” (McKittrick 2011, 948). Viewed this way, Delisha’s and Tree’s bones are just bones, objects for scientific problem-solving. The knowledge the anthropologist is tasked with passing on is not one that bounds emotions and traditions. She is in the classroom, and her concern is expert knowledge. How do you date a bone to differentiate it from another bone? Yet this is not only about epistemology. This is also about a racial ontology of institutionalized whiteness, which resonates in and beyond the university.

Thus, by centering institutionalized racial ontologies as produced through geopolitical processes of distancing Black bodies from humanity, we can understand the mattering of Black bones as being conditioned by the geopolitical relations connecting the police, the CIA, extractive industries, and everyday life. Under magnification, one might focus on what is brought closest to view: the individual culpability of Professor Monge. But to focus simply on her actions is to blame one individual for a larger disciplinary issue that requires attention. What questions must be asked to understand these processes? What linkages and forms of analysis are needed to understand histories of violence, and what are the limits to our knowledge of them? These questions are instructive, as they allow us to map the practices of scientific objectification that maintain inequality. They also highlight that US imperialism and its geopolitics are not strictly an overseas phenomenon. Rather, the history of MOVE and its anthropological machinations are just one example of the domestic side of imperialist policy. Blackness and race therefore come to matter precisely through a series of geopolitical logics in which Black bodies are placed and unplaced, both domestically and globally: the retention of a child’s unburied bones, the execution of policy that led to firebombing homes and lives, and the imprisonment of seven African Americans for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer can all be scaled up against parallel geopolitical logics of international legality, military intervention, and trade. These geopolitical processes inside the United States provide invaluable modalities for questioning what gets imagined as geopolitical, often outside of the United States and using metrics that often disavow the workings of interrelated assemblages of politics and power.

In this case, there are at least four levels of geopolitical distancing at play that render a child into a bare bone, ready to be objectified and used as data. First, there is an epistemological distancing at work: the positivist labor that detaches a person’s bones from their biography and forms the basis of estrangement—in this case, from the two Africa children whose biographies Monge is not responsible for knowing. This relation is central to the Cartesian subject-object relation (Lock and Farquhar 2007). Second, Monge is an untenured faculty member, whom I came to know when I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and is alienated from the conditions of labor. The forms of distancing and detachment at play, therefore, are not unrelated to her institutional marginality (Lacy and Rome 2017). Over the past twenty-plus years, she has been cobbling together part-time positions across two states to make a living, and thus her own precarity is not unrelated to the realities of a teaching-intensive labor.[7] Third, there is the distancing from conditions of racial and state violence that have not only shaped the conditions of the death of MOVE’s members and the Africa children but that are also tied to a long history of dehumanization of BIPOC bodies and forms of white supremacy that have produced exclusions and rendered some bodies into bare life and bare death (Blakey 1999; Jackson 2020; Mignolo 2015). The conditions of detachment are related to Monge’s position as a middle-class white Philadelphian liberal for whom such histories of surveillance and targeting do not constitute everyday realities. Fourth, there is a disciplinary distancing and detachment connected to the history of positivism and the anthropological imperative to produce truth and data and fulfill the conditions of objectivity. These institutional logics produce the detached methods that lead to the normalization of bones as objects for scientific pedagogy (de la Cova 2019; DiGangi and Bethard 2021).

These four dimensions of distancing—that is, of geopolitical estrangement—are not unrelated and require interrelated analysis. Their connections with the processes of alienation and detachment speak to the way that some remains are buried and granted humanity and others are desecrated and rendered objects of science. This alienation is, indeed, about individuals and subject-object relations, state and racial violence, but it is also deeply entangled with histories of racial science and the disposability of BIPOC lives in the discipline and in our world.

While holding these in tension, it is worth considering how the fourth form of estrangement, positivist detachment, has traditionally been required for disciplinary reproduction. In the opening discussion concerning Delisha’s and Tree’s remains, we saw that the context of “bone” production did not matter to Professor Monge. Our task as anthropologists is to see, instead, children seeking a revolutionary future, whose lives were embedded in social relationships. And though post-1985, their bones represented puzzles that were not fully solved, the human story is that they were sisters, daughters, friends. Their smells, jokes, and stories were the things that connected them to a community and connected us to that community in the process. When Professor Monge continued to use their bones as teaching tools, she did so under conditions of estrangement that were not her own either.

The practices of disciplinary detachment that have normalized such practices are deeply connected to the rise of positivism and, by extension, of four-field anthropology (Blakey 1999, 2020; Harrison 2011). Estrangement and detachment through subject-object distancing are core components of the scientific method. How can we rethink geopolitics through the mattering of Black bones to reckon with how particular entanglements of knowledge and violence are co-produced through ongoing objectification? How might we turn instead to open-ended methods that produce less certainty about the existence of one true explanation of the world and that foreground the continued person embodied in bodily remains?

To explore the conditions by which such forms of estrangement produce disciplinary objects, thereby removing racial contexts from subjects, an anthropology of geopolitics related to Black bones that matter allows us to move beyond positivist detachment and instead emphasize an anthropology of connection through an ethics and politics of attachment. This approach to geopolitics can highlight ways that race is reproduced spatially by reckoning with the imbrication of empire, state violence, science, and distancing as modalities that enable such formations. To understand the geopolitics of racial formations in this context is to recognize how science’s afterlife can be mapped onto historic and ongoing inequalities within and outside of US empire. Reckoning with these geopolitics is critical for making sense of the contexts within which anthropological work is made real. Without these spatial and political maps, we risk misunderstanding how the geopolitics of race and racism structure not only our social histories and environments but also the making of anthropological knowledge.

References Cited

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Blakey, Michael L. 2020. “Understanding Racism in Physical (Biological) Anthropology.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 175 (2): 316–25.

de la Cova, Carlina. 2019. “Marginalized Bodies and the Construction of the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Skeletal Collection: A Promised Land Lost.” In Bioarchaeology of Marginalized People, edited by Madeleine L. Mant and Alyson Jaagumägi Holland, 133–55. London: Academic Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2003. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

DiGangi, Elizabeth, and Jonathan Bethard. 2021. “Uncloaking a Lost Cause: Decolonizing Ancestry Estimation in the United States.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 175 (2): 422–36.

Doucet-Battle, James. 2016. “Sweet Salvation: One Black Church, Diabetes Outreach, and Trust.” Transforming Anthropology 24 (2): 125–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12073

Farmer, Ashley D. 2017. Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era. Chapel Hill: UNC Press.

Flaherty, Colleen. “A Mystery and a Scandal for Anthropology.” Inside Higher Ed, April 23. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/23/anthropological-mystery-involving-penn-and-princeton-scandal-too.

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Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: NYU Press.

Joseph, Peniel E., ed. 2006. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. London: Taylor & Francis.

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O’Brian, Jackson. “Remains of Black Teen Killed in Philadelphia Police Bombing Used in Online Class.” New York Post, April 22. https://nypost.com/2021/04/23/remains-of-black-teen-killed-in-philadelphia-police-bombing-used-in-online-anthropology-course/.

Pilkington, Ed. “A Siege. A Bomb. 48 Dogs. And the Black Commune That Would Not Surrender.” The Guardian, July 31. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/31/a-siege-a-bomb-48-dogs-and-the-black-commune-that-would-not-surrender.

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Notes

Special thanks to those who offered feedback on parts of this draft as well as the earlier version: Kris Peterson, Samar Al-Bulushi, Kristin Bright, Jennifer Burrell, Lieba Fairer, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Sara Kendall, and Nicholas Smith.

[1] Multiple sources trace the encounters between MOVE and the Philadelphia Police. The source primarily used in this paragraph is Anna Orso, “MOVE 101: Why, 35 Years Ago, Philadelphia Dropped a Bomb on Itself,” Billy Penn, May 11, 2020, https://billypenn.com/2020/05/11/move-101-why-30-years-ago-philadelphia-dropped-a-bomb-on-itself/. For a more detailed account, see Assefa’s (1990) book on the MOVE crisis.

[2] Those killed included children Katricia Dotson (Tree), Netta, Delitia (Delisha), Phil, and Tomasa Africa and adults Rhonda, Teresa, Frank, CP, Conrad, and John Africa (1931–1985). Only two people survived: thirteen-year-old Birdie Africa, and Ramona Africa. Following Ramona Africa’s release from jail (on charges of riot and conspiracy), she sought justice for her family and in 1996 a federal jury ordered the city to pay a US$1.5 million civil suit judgment to Ramona Africa and relatives of two people killed in the bombing. In November 2020, the city of Philadelphia formally apologized for the 1985 MOVE bombing. No compensation was included with this apology and recent developments suggest that the two Africa children’s remains were never returned. Following protests and negotiations with the Africa family, Tree’s and Delisha’s remains were finally set to rest on May 7, 2021.

[3] Teo Armus, “A Philly Museum Kept the Bones of a Black Child Killed in a Police Bombing. Decades Later, It’s Apologizing,” The Washington Post, April 30, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/30/philadelphia-move-bombing-bones-upenn/.

[4] Maya Kassutto, “Remains of Children Killed in MOVE Bombing Sat in a Box at Penn Museum for Decades,” Billy Penn, April 21, 2021, https://billypenn.com/2021/04/21/move-bombing-penn-museum-bones-remains-princeton-africa/.

[5] Mike Africa, in Ed Pilkington, “Bones of Black Children Killed in Police Bombing Used in Ivy League Anthropology Course,” The Guardian, April 23, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/22/move-bombing-black-children-bones-philadelphia-princeton-pennsylvania.

[6] The most infamous of these experiments is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, spanning forty years from the fall of 1932 until press leaks put an end to the project in 1972. The experiment was run by the Public Health Service and conscripted Black men, many of them poor, to be tested and treated for “bad blood” and rheumatism. The participants were not told that the study primarily concerned the progression of syphilis, a deadly venereal disease that two thirds of participants had, and which was left to progress untreated; see Deneen L. Brown, “‘You’ve Got Bad Blood’: The Horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” The Washington Post, May 16, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/16/youve-got-bad-blood-the-horror-of-the-tuskegee-syphilis-experiment/. The experimental gynecological surgeries performed by James Marion Sims are another example of scientific violence, in this case enacted upon enslaved Black women; see Harriet A. Washington, “A Medical Hell Recounted by its Victims,” Nature, January 29, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586–019–00340–5. So too is the extraction of cervical cells from the body of Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent; see “ Henrietta Lacks: Science Must Right a Historical Wrong,” Nature, September 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586–020–02494-z.

[7] Deborah Thomas, in her recent reflection in the History of Anthropology Review, explores how the university acts as a space of enclosure that facilitates the continuation of colonial violence and extraction. Enclosure, Thomas argues, not only refers to the material or physical state of being held, but “encompasses the spatial, temporal, and psychic forms of restriction that confine our existence and our imagination.” See Deborah Thomas, “Enclosures and Extraction: MOVE and the Penn Museum,” History of Anthropology Review, May 14, 2021, https://histanthro.org/news/observations/enclosures-and-extraction/.

Cite As

Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2022. “The Geopolitics of Black Bones that Matter.” American Anthropologist website, August 4.