Vera Mae Green

Welcome to the publication, “Representations.” This is a project designed to bring the perspectives of a wider variety of groups to the forefront of the anthropology classroom. To celebrate Black History Month, we are covering the accomplishments of 28 Black anthropologists across 28 days. Learn more about our project, and read on for the amazing accomplishments of Vera Mae Green.

Anthropologist Vera Mae Green’s work rightly critiques anthropology’s historical inability to study the African diaspora in a way that recognizes and embraces diversity within the group (Jackson 2018). Today, this attitude toward the examination of any group is essential — anthropologists know that racial or cultural groups encompass their own great diversity — and our field owes Green’s research and publications for largely establishing this path.

Green argued that failing to recognize the diversity with the Black community leads to the development of poor governmental policy that directly impacts the lives of these same people (Jackson 2018). This perspective changed the way that anthropologists think about race and cultural research today, and, Green’s unique brand of applied anthropology (anthropology with a practical application) touched the work of her own students and peers alike as they continued a brand of anthropology that recognized the potential policy implications of anthropological research.

Vera Mae Green was also an educator who — among many notable contributions to the field — is also known for her role in being a mentor for aspiring anthropologists. She was a founder and the first president of the Association of Black Anthropologists, a section of the American Anthropology Association. Green earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1969. She was the first African American Caribbeanist. Her research interests included cultural anthropology, interethnic relations, diversity in Black communities, Mestizos in Mexico, and the Caribbean, Israel, and India.

Green taught anthropology for many years at different universities. She served as chair and graduate advisor of the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. The last position she held before her death was the director of Rutger’s Latin American Institute. She died after a battle with cancer in 1982 at the age of fifty-three.

Her article “The Confrontation of Diversity within the Black Community” (1970) shines a light on how the diversity of Black communities was not being recorded. Sociologists and anthropologists at the time were choosing to write about slums and ghettos as the only sort of Black community instead of reporting on how diverse the communities could be. There had been no concern for the variation in types of Black families, most works had been insistent on putting Black families into only a couple of categories. In her book Migrants in Aruba (1974), she critiques the prevalent methods of studying Black and Caribbean communities. Green also criticizes previous research done on Black communities in her article “The Confrontation of Diversity within the Black Community’’ (1970), arguing that contemporary scholars do not acknowledge diversity in the Black population but focus instead on the lower economic classes and then apply these findings universally. It was groundbreaking work as it was one of the first to demand the heterogeneity of Black communities to be acknowledged.

Bibliography

Cole, Johnnetta B. “Obituaries.” American Anthropologist, vol. 84, no. 3, pp. 633–635.

“Dr. Vera Mae Green.” The New York Times, 18 Jan. 1982, p. 10.

Green, Vera M. “The Confrontation of Diversity within the Black Community.” Human Organization, vol. 29, no. 4, 1970.

Jackson, Antoinette. “Vera Mae Green: Quacker Roots and Applied Anthropology.” The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology, 15 Nov. 2018, pp. 33–41., doi:10.5406/j.ctv9b2vtr.5.

Edited by Travis Du Bry, Los Angeles Southwest College.