The Rhodes Scholarships were announced this week, and one of Penn’s Anthropology students, Abigail Seldin, was among 32 Americans to receive the coveted award this year. Abigail is an amazing student (working on her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology at the exact same time), and she has conducted some powerful ethnographic and archival research among the Lenape nation in Pennsylvania.

Abigail has played a significant role helping to curate an exhibit on the Lenape at University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology and Archeology. That exhibit, “Fulfilling a Prophecy: The Past and Present of the Lenape in Pennsylvania” will be up for display until Fall 2009. It is well worth checking out.

Congrats to Aligail! And enjoy Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

This year’s awards made me think about the kinds of debates we had about Rhodes when I was still an undergraduate at Howard University. The school had a small contingent of politicized undergraduates who argued that Black students had no business applying for Rhodes scholarships, and that was mostly because of Cecil Rhodes himself, because of his history as a rapacious miner of diamonds in Africa (founder of De Beers) and because of his canonical status as a 19th-century colonialist/imperialist, the person after whom the country of Rhodesia was named.

The naysayers maintained that African-American students shouldn’t even entertain the thought of competing for scholarships named after such historical figures, no matter how prestigious the awards. The same students joked that they’d only consider vying for such prizes after they were renamed, maybe called something like the Zimbabwean Scholarships. (The conspiracy theorists among us also had a lot to say about Rhodes, which the video above helps to showcase.)

Of course, this was mostly just idle talk. Few of the students making such claims had any serious shot at landing the prize to begin with. Not that they weren’t good students. Many of them were. Also, they didn’t use their critique of Rhodes (as a racist and a war-monger) to justify their own academic underachievement. Instead, these were students who worked incredibly hard at the subjects they deemed valuable.

I never applied for a Rhodes scholarship, but I know several Howard students who did. For all I know, such debates are no longer taking place on the campus. Whatever the case, students shouldn’t feel guilty about receiving an award that allows them to continue their education, even if its namesake is far from a saint.