Fellow hominins-

We have three things to discuss today.

First of all, we would like to acknowledge the increasing number of soapboxing posts due to the significantly greater traffic to the sub over the past year.

What does soapboxing mean? Soapboxing is using someone else’s platform as a space to advocate one’s own ideas. We stand with our sister sub, /r/askhistorians, in not providing a space for ideas born out of prejudice and ignorance. Allowing race realism and pseudoarchaeology to be debated here suggests they derive from the same level of academic inquiry as anthropology. They do not.

We do acknowledge that popular usage of terms like “race” is often inconsistent with anthropologists’ understandings. We also acknowledge that this usage does not immediately imply ill intent. There is a difference between casually using the word “race” in a colloquial sense and “casual” Holocaust denial.

With that in mind, our approach in the past months has been to err on the side of recognizing teachable moments. Where a submitter’s intent is unclear, we aim to provide some explanation as to why their wording or implicit assumption may be problematic. We have turned to removals and bans when it is clear that a user’s intent is not to learn.

This is AskAnthropology. It is not DebateAnthropology, nor is it AskYouTubePsychologists.

Secondly…

Several months ago, the mod team laid out proposals for some new rules. We would like to start the new year by instituting several of them.

The complete list can be found here.

The new rules on answers more or less put our current practices into writing.

The new rules on questions are an effort to reduce the number of bad, speculative answers.

Our modified statement on race reflects our above stance that this is an educational space where a certain lack of knowledge is assumed. Comments that only say “Race isn’t real” and do not attempt to further engage with a question will be removed. They get in the way of productive conversation and do not address the particular assumptions latent in each question that uses the word “race.”

And lastly, we are finally introducing the promised Career Thread.

Career questions are great, but they do see a lot of the same answers repeated. To help with this, all such questions will be directed to a Career Thread that will be posted each month. We hope that by seeing questions other users have asked, newcomers will be able to ask better questions that lead to more helpful responses.