AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST VITAL TOPICS FORUM A Parrot among John Crows: Diversity as Risk and Reward DOI: 10.1111/aman.13217 Jada Benn Torres Vanderbilt University As a child of immigrants from Trinidad, I grew up in two worlds. At home, I was immersed in Trinidadian values that emphasized education and hard work. Outside of the home, I learned how to navigate a complex US racialized environment that does not always value the perspectives of women, much less the perspectives of black women. Vacillating between these worlds stoked my desire to inquire about how people construct their ideas about the world. In addition, moving between these spaces helped me learn how to manage my insecurities about being in places or among people that are different from me. The skills that I learned inside and outside of my home paved the way for me to become a professional anthropologist. Working as a genetic anthropologist, I still move be- tween two worlds. In my lab, and in academia in general, my research productivity is prioritized. In my fieldsites, my desire and ability to establish community-engaged research projects is what I value most. The expectations associated with academic life can sometimes conflict with the desire of doing community-engaged research. However, in learning to navigate my professional and personal obligations regard- ing my research, I learned that appreciating the diversity of backgrounds and life experiences of those around me helps to build resilience to discrimination and to make meaningful inquiries about the world. It is this appreciation for diversity that has shaped, and continues to shape, my approach to an- thropology. Learning how to recognize the value in diversity is a continuous process, one that is molded by my experi- ences in both academic settings and—most influentially—in my fieldwork experiences. In summer 2011, I initiated a project in Accompong Town, Jamaica, to address the biogeographic origins of the resident Maroon community. I was interested in learning if and how genetic data could elucidate this community’s oral history about their Afro-Indigenous origins and more broadly provide some insights on how African-descended peoples forged new lives and identities for themselves in the Americas. During these few months in Jamaica, I roamed the village with my collaborator, local research assistant, and my student in search of participants for my study. For every AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1–2, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C  2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13217 individual that eventually provided consent to participate, there were multitudes of others who declined to be part of the study. Consequently, in between enrolling new partic- ipants, I had a lot of time to consider some of the factors that shape how and why people choose not to give consent. Much of what I thought about is discussed in Ruha Benjamin’s 2016 article, in which she concludes that refusals can lead to “a way to construct more reciprocal relationships between institutions and individuals” (18). One particular encounter stayed with me over the years and has ultimately shaped how I have come to understand how diversity, brought about by different life experiences and perspectives, has the potential to be transformative. On this day, my research team and I came across a man, whom I will call Evans. Evans was just past middle age and was sitting in front of his home with his rubber-booted feet propped up, taking a rest from his morning work in the field. After introducing myself and my purpose, Evans declined to participate in the study, warning me with an aphorism: “In a crowd of John Crows, the parrot gets shot.” 1 As he patiently explained, through his life experiences he had learned not to trust so easily and consequently was unwilling to provide a sample of his DNA for my project. Though I may never know the nature of his affinity to me that led him to ex- plain his refusal at length, in making his statement, he was warning me that I too should not trust easily. As I under- stood it, his warning to me was that, as a black woman, I was working in arenas that have not historically been equitable to all people. Evans recognized that my participation in scien- tific research could potentially put me—and by extension, my study participants—in situations where, due to exist- ing inequalities based on sex and race, I could be harmed. Though disappointed to not get a sample, I moved on with the project, though Evans’s words continued to resonate as I pursued my work. As I reflect on what that encounter meant that day and what it means overall to my work as an anthropologist, I am more committed to thinking about positionality within ge- netic research. Here, I use the term positionality to refer to the sum of life experiences, inclusive of one’s social spaces, that mold a person’s perspective and manner of interacting in the world. Accordingly, positionality is neither a syn- onym for relativity nor in opposition to objectivity. Rather, positionality is the acknowledgment that one’s perspective shapes how one understands and interacts with the world