At the American Anthropological Association’s yearly meeting in Toronto, 2023, small stickers were available with slogans including “Decolonize anthropology,” “Like a Boas,” “Channeling Zora,” and “It’s OUR responsibility.” But anthropologists’ anxious relationship to the history of our field will not be resolved with a sticker. Debates over how to reckon with anthropology’s past carry on.

Tony Platt’s book The Scandal of Cal (2023) joins scholarship dedicated to uncovering connections between higher education (including anthropology), settler colonialism, slavery and racist legacies, particularly in the US (cf. Anbert 2024; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nisancioğlu 2018; la paperson 2017; Stein 2022; Wilder 2013). Platt is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley and a founder of the Berkeley Truth and Justice Project that began in 2020. The book is a polemical retelling of UC Berkeley’s history. It makes broad connections between the Manhattan project and the destruction of Indigenous lands near Los Alamos, UC Berkeley scientists’ involvement in developing the atomic bomb, the lack of memorials on campus to civilian lives in Japan and Indigenous lives in California, eugenics, and the hoarding of Indigenous artifacts and human remains. The concept of “connections” though, remains vague: which connections have been omitted? Can just about anything be understood as a connection?

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