The keynote speaker, a well-known American anthropologist in his 50s, wearing a tight T-shirt that showed off his tattooed arms, stood on stage in front of a packed ballroom at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association, the most elite social-science gathering of its kind in the United States. “To quote the taxi driver who drove me from the airport,” he said, pausing for one theatrical beat, “ ‘fuck ICE!’ ”
The audience — from grey-haired professors at the top of their game to undergraduates, there to present a poster — whooped, cheered, and clapped enthusiastically.
We were five minutes in, and I, an ethnographer with a doctorate in anthropology and 30 years’ experience, already felt not-at-home. The speaker, Jason De León, an academic star who has won every major award the academy can bestow, began his talk by recounting how he’d “remained silent” during an event he attended at which colleagues offered public condolences for the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. He’d been disturbed by the sympathy, he said, because “Charlie Kirk was a peddler of hate speech.” However, his silence had “inhibited” him, and his speech for that prior event was mediocre, he told us, because he had not been “true to himself.”