Leith Mullings, Social Justice Anthropologist

Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York

Leith Mullings’ death is a terrible blow to anthropology – and a heartbreaking loss to those of us who were lucky enough to have worked and collaborated with her.  For many of us, Leith’s death, which happened on December 13, 2020, is still almost too much to bear.  It would have been hard to accept under normal circumstances, but to have it happen so unexpectedly – and in the context of the Trump insurrection and the extended COVID emergency, when so many of us are already feeling so much vulnerability, grief, fear, isolation, and uncertainty – makes it feel terrible in a way that, at the very least, reveals the deep inadequacies of standard academic grieving rituals.  And yet, here I go.

Leith was a leading figure of the Black Left who established a pathbreaking form of anthropological praxis that was deeply aligned with the struggle for the worldwide emancipation of Black people.  Her praxis was rooted in Black feminism, in the centering of African American working class women’s lives in broader theorizing about political economy, kinship, representation, and resistance, and in emphasizing the importance of social movements involving people of the African diaspora in struggles for justice and equality.  The influence of her work is especially remarkable given the reactionary status quo in anthropology of the last three decades, which, let’s face it, has a very poor track record of providing institutional and intellectual space to Black women scholars.  Fortunately, Leith, her allies, and her students worked over many decades to legitimate Black feminist materialist approaches in a discipline that to this day remains reluctant to give them the attention they deserve.

A remarkable aspect of Leith’s anthropology is the specific and subtle ways that she imparted antiracist political sensibilities into it.  For Leith, as for many other scholars, racism, sexism, and capitalism were co-constitutive of overlapping systems of oppression, exploitation, violence, subordination, and discrimination.  What made Leith’s work unique was her insistence on the power of antiracist activism and organizing to interrupt, unsettle, and contest the system’s hierarchies and inequalities.  In her long-term ethnographic study of African American women’s health in Harlem, for example, she and her co-author Alaka Wali consider race, class and gender not as attributes of low-income women of color who suffer from ill health.  Rather, they see race, class and gender more dynamically, as a set of interconnected relationalities that shape health outcomes in complex ways.  In her famous elaboration of Sojourner Syndrome, the survival strategy of resilience adopted by African American women to support their families and communities, Leith emphasizes not just the resilience that living under the yoke of multiplicative oppressions requires of them and how this stresses them out, but also the importance of Black community struggles for autonomy, power and control.  Along similar lines, in her work on racisms in the Americas, and on Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, Leith showed how new movements build on Black freedom struggles from the past to contest the co-production of racism and capitalism. In a Left intellectual context in which identity politics is frequently disparaged and class universalism reigns, Leith’s was an essential and powerful voice whose work demonstrated the significance of transnational antiracist activism and organizing: what she called “racialization from below.” Across more than 40 years of intellectual work, she provided irrefutable evidence that intersectional struggles have connected targets and effects.  Let us hope that others who are committed to justice and equality pay attention to this important lesson.

Decades after prominent scholars called for decolonizing anthropology, US anthropology still attracts too few Black, Indigenous and Latinx students. In the wake of the Black insurgent activism of last year, abolitionist theories and methods are slowly gaining traction but are not nearly as widespread as they should be.  The task of emancipating critical historical ethnographic scholarship from anthropology’s imperial and white supremacist present remains an enormous challenge.  A new generation of US-based Black anthropologists are influenced by Afropessimist arguments about antiblack world building and the exclusion of Black people from the category of the human. They are looking for ways to incorporate class into their analyses.  This effort is not helped along by a Left anthropology that only gives lip service to race and gender in its anticapitalist critique. Fortunately, there is Leith’s work. Her illumination of Black women’s experience of work, kinship, and community life, her attention to overlapping systems of oppression, exploitation and discrimination, and her pioneering approach to the study of social movements serve as inspiration to all scholars who are searching for a way to move past the tired old race vs. class. vs. gender argument, who wish to take capitalism, racism and sexism seriously, and who seek to reconcile these differences in a unified emancipatory framework.

For Leith Mullings

Don Robotham, City University of New York

I first met Leith Mullings as a doctoral student in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago in 1967. Based on our common background and interests, we quickly became friends—part of a group of progressive students on the eve of the Martin Luther King assassination and the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Those were tumultuous years, formative for both of us. Later, she joined me for fieldwork in Ghana and remained close friends thereafter.

Leith was a remarkable person who was able somehow to manage the feat of successfully raising two wonderful children, political activism, developing her large body of scholarship, rising to the top of her profession while being a major interlocutor for her partner’s intellectual work and those of her colleagues and friends. She was deeply committed to the Black struggle first and foremost and always put this in a larger context of the struggle against racism and all forms of oppression of all peoples worldwide.

Her experience of 1968 and after made her a political economist and she never wavered from that position or methodology. The principal focus of her work was racial oppression as it interacted with class oppression, gender and health, with the emphasis decidedly on the first. From her earliest work on mental health issues in Accra, Ghana, through her book on reproductive health in Harlem to her most recent project on racial oppression of indigenous and African-descended peoples in Latin America, it was the issue of the material basis of racial oppression on which her work was focused. This broad experience and sweep led Leith to the view that racial oppression was by no means a local or national phenomenon of the United States of America but one with deep historical global roots. Thus, over time she was led naturally towards the intersectionality concept as a fundamental tool for understanding oppression and, what was critical for her, laying the basis for a politics of transformation.

We had many debates on the many challenges which this approach raised, principally around how much weight to give to class, as distinct from race and gender, and indeed, whether it was possible or fruitful to make such distinctions. She would generally hold to the race end and I to the class end with gender falling in-between in terms of analytical priority. Leith well understood that adopting the intersectionality concept did not quite resolve the issue but sharpened it: how and why these forces ‘intersected’ and which, if any, was analytically or politically prior remained to be answered, theoretically and empirically via fieldwork. Thus, our debates raged before and through our current political crisis prior to the 2020 US Presidential election.

Leith gave as good as she got, indeed usually one came out on the losing end. She was deeply grounded in both the classics of political economy and a wide range of anthropological research. It was impossible to impress her with theoretical acrobatics. Her combination of academic knowledge and practical political experience made her a formidable interlocutor and scholar. Her devotion to her students and her conscientiousness in the exercise of her doctoral supervision duties was something to behold. Few could compete with her in the quality of the voluminous comments and stylistic guidance provided. While always sympathetic, she insisted that high standards of scholarship be maintained especially when a thesis was addressing radical experiences, as many were. Her scholarly integrity was impeccable and unchallenged, and she enjoyed the wide respect of many who strongly disagreed with her theoretical and political positions.

Leith Mullings was very much a product of the 1960s and 1970s. Like many of us, she was deeply influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Revolution, the Anti-Vietnam War struggle and especially 1968. She has added to that tradition of intellectual and political struggle in a lasting way, always insisting that oppression had a material foundation, the analysis and transformation of which should be the focus of our work and life. We have lost a wonderful, kind, human being, scholar and activist, when we can least afford to.

The editorial boards of Focaal and FocaalBlog join our colleagues and friends in remembering the life and work of Leith Mullings; a scholar and activist who has shaped our scholarship and politics.