A reputable online anthropology publication offers an insight into the ongoing racial obsessions of a discipline founded more than a century ago when racists tried to use the field to advance white superiority.  Now, though, the whole point of anthropology is to advance the superiority of races other than the white race.  This is not an improvement.

Sapiens is a digital anthropology magazine.  Its "about us" page says the publication is meant to change "how people see themselves and the people around them."  It also hopes to "deepen your understanding of the human experience by exploring exciting, novel, thought-provoking, and unconventional ideas."  A lot of these ideas aren't novel at all.  Instead, they're just racial theories that are the reverse image of theories from 100 years ago.  Then, it was "white good and black bad."  Now the opposite is true.

The magazine certainly has an audience.  Its articles are syndicated at some heavy online hitters catering to people who believe themselves to be well informed: The Atlantic, Slate, DiscoverMagazine, ScientificAmerican, Aeon, and RealClearScience, to name just a few.

On social media, Sapiens's Facebook page has over 70,000 likes and follows, and it has another 18.9 thousand Twitter followers.  This attractively packaged website is the kind of publication that students use for research products.

For those curious as to whether Sapiens has a noticeable bias, Media Bias/Fact Check says Sapiens has only a "slight to moderate liberal bias."  While its editorials don't like Trump, "[m]ost information is science based and free from bias."

Here's a sampling of the kind of unbiased, pro-science material you'll find at Sapiens:

In "Can Protesters Humanize the Police," Hugh Gusterson accuses police of stifling the speech of tearful, loving activists, who are only trying, desperately and mostly unsuccessfully, to humanize these robotic fascists.

In "Why the Whiteness of Archaeology Is a Problem," William White (who is black) and Catherine Draycott explain that whites are ineptly and insensitively trying to understand people who are different.  They accuse the whites of associating these differences with being unequal (and, presumably, inferior).  I lost interest when the article bogged down in theories about "othering" and unconscious bias.

In "Is the Term 'People of Color' Acceptable?," Yolanda Moses (writing in 2016, although it's a "most popular" article now) explained at length that POC is a collective term that gives different racial groups "the potential to form solidarities with each other for collective political and social action on behalf of many disenfranchised or marginalized people.  This terminology is useful in social justice and in civil rights and human rights contexts."  Academese is awful writing, isn't it?  Ultimately, the problem is that people of different races don't like being lumped together.

In "Why Do We Keep Using the Word 'Caucasian?'," that same Yolanda Moses (this time writing an article in 2017 that's popular today) explains that Caucasian is a meaningless word because it originated in the 18th century, when a German anatomist trying to classify people by race thought the people of the Caucasus Mountains perfectly represented people with white(ish) skin. The word "Caucasian" caught on for describing whites, and it's therefore still racist today.  Moses wants to hyphenate people instead.  To African-Americans, we'd add European-Americans and Mexican-Americans, a wordy way to say the same things we've been saying before.

In "What Ancient Gender Fluidity Taught Me About Modern Patriarchy," María Fernanda Ugalde tells us that thousand-year-old clay figurines in Ecuador aren't always clearly one sex or the other.  "In decoding these gender relations of the past, I have begun to think differently about the present — and my role in a modern, chauvinistic, Ecuadorian society."  And then she's off about the patriarchy and women's health magazines.

Other recent articles include

• "Native American Children's Historic Forced Assimilation"
• "Confronting the Colonial Legacies of Museum Collections"
• "Are Pandemics Good for the Environment?" (animals are returning to abandoned streets)
• "No, 'Racial Genetics' Aren't Affecting COVID-19 Deaths" (a mid-June article insisting that minorities are dying more because of racism, not genetics)

A mere three weeks after Sapiens published that last article, telling us that DNA is irrelevant to the Wuhan virus, the New York Times reported that "DNA Inherited From Neanderthals May Increase Risk of Covid-19."  The same article noted that:

Genes play a role as well. Last month, researchers compared people in Italy and Spain who became very sick with Covid-19 to those who had only mild infections. They found two places in the genome associated with a greater risk. One is on Chromosome 9 and includes ABO, a gene that determines blood type. The other is the Neanderthal segment on Chromosome 3.

Whoops!

Sapiens is just one of many leftist online publications, but I note it because it perfectly represents the kind of racial obsessions that drive modern academic anthropology.  Just as many anthropologists in the first half of the 20th century dedicated themselves to proving white superiority, today's anthropologists are doing the opposite when they work to prove white inferiority.  This racial misuse of anthropology was revolting 100 years ago, and it's still revolting today.

Image: A 1921 picture showing the Shrine of the Rain Gods from the Archaeological Society of New Mexico.