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Contribution short abstract:

While we have an increased awareness in regards to racism and intersectionality, the dynamics of emotional labor, whiteness, and epistemic justice that play into these fields remain widely unaddressed on a structural level.

Contribution long abstract:

In my contribution, I want to reflect on the problem of racism and the need for intersectional justice in regards to emotional labor. While we have an increased awareness in regards to racism and intersectionality, the dynamics of emotional labor, whiteness, and epistemic justice that play into these fields remain widely unaddressed on a structural level. Anti-racism remains an add-on or the source of the problem because it is discarded as ideology. As long as we keep feeding this biased understanding and relationship between anti-racism and anthropology, intersectional justice will not be possible. On an academic level, where dominant methodological and theoretical discussions are still rooted in coloniality and whiteness, and on a structural level, where racism is most often addressed by BIPOC scholars and students in precarious positions, the racialization of emotional labor becomes apparent. Response-ability can lie within new forms of solidarity, scholarship, and commitment that reveal these underlying dynamics and racializations of emotional labor by applying antiracist and intersectional knowledge, on a structural level, for example through anti-racism standards for anthropology in regards to funding, research, teaching and compulsory anti-bias trainings.