Robert Sussman

Robert Wald Sussman (July 4, 1941 – June 8, 2016) was an American anthropologist and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sussman was born in Brooklyn in 1941. He earned undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, and he completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at Duke University in 1972. The next year, he became a member of the faculty at WUSTL. In the 1990s, he was editor-in-chief of the journal American Anthropologist. Sussman was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000.

In 2015, Sussman wrote The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. In this book, he described race as a social construct rather than an entity based on science. After suffering a stroke, Sussman died on June 8, 2016.