Kenneth J. Guest

“It is evident that wealth is even more unevenly distributed than income and
that the gap is widening. Since 1976, wealth has increased by 63 percent for the
wealthiest 1 percent of the population and by 71 percent for the top 20 percent.
Wealth has decreased by 43 percent for the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population (Economic Policy Institute 2011). The widening gap has multiple causes.
First, shifts in the U.S. tax code have lowered the top tax rate from 91 percent
in the years from 1950 to 1963, to 35 percent from 2003 to 2012, allowing the
wealthy to retain far more of their income (Tax Policy Center 2012). Second,
wages for most U.S. families have stagnated since the early 1970s. Moreover,
credit card, education, and mortgage debt have skyrocketed. Finally, the collapse
of the housing market beginning in 2007 dramatically affected many middleclass families who held a significant portion of their wealth in the value of their
home. By 2012, fully 31 percent of all homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth (Zillow 2012).”
― Kenneth J Guest, Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age

“Anthropology should be required for citizenship
for people who are native-born because it helps them
to understand the world we live in, the country we live
in, the histories we have. People really don’t know much
about their own culture, their own country. For instance,
people really don’t know to what extent the United
States has mistreated its own native peoples. In my home
state of California, we had veritable genocide that lasted
from the period of the gold rush to the first decade of the
twentieth century. We have never really confronted and
acknowledged that. To move forward, we have to face our
complicated history with indigenous genocide, slavery,
and eugenics applied to immigrants in the 1920s as well.
Our history is not all negative, of course. I love to travel
across the country by car every few years to meet with
and talk with Americans from different parts of the country. There is also a lot to be proud of in being an American. But we do have to understand how our nation came
into its present form. We’re no different from any other
country. All nations are born in violence. But our role is
to make them less violent, make them more viable, make
them more equitable. That’s where anthropology comes
in. I think anthropology helps us to look and question
what Virginia Woolf called “unreal loyalties” — loyalties
to a particular definition of an ethnic group or an origin
story. Instead, anthropology helps us to understand and
engage the richness, complexity, and conflict involved in
making the United States. In this way anthropology can
help us become better Americans.”
― Kenneth J Guest, Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age