Mary Dockray-Miller

For more than 150 years, the term “Anglo-Saxons” has connoted “implicitly superior white people” in much of uk and us conventional discourse. Some academics now insist on the possibility of a highly specialised usage, referencing only a specific chronology and geography. However, the racism embedded in the mainstream use of the term inevitably seeps into its academic meaning, reinforcing the field’s whiteness and discouraging students of colour from entering the field at all. Members of the Medievalists of Color organisation have repeatedly attempted to educate the field at large about their experiences of racism and exclusion within academic medieval studies; resistance of some scholars to this information indicates inability to look beyond white privilege and academic hierarchy towards a multicultural, global understanding of the Middle Ages and history writ large. “Anglo-Saxon” is on its way to the dustbin already occupied by terms like “oriental” and “negro”. At some point, I hope sooner rather than later, it will no longer be appropriate in active discourse, inside or outside the academy.

Mary Dockray-Miller is humanities professor in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Lesley University, Cambridge Massachusetts