During an exchange program in Australia, Baker was alarmed to observe similar problems affecting Aboriginal Australians, who were "nothing like the black folks [he] knew in the United States.
For the next ten years, from 2000 to 2010, Baker was an associate professor of cultural anthropology, sociology, and African & African-American studies at Duke University.
In 2008, Baker became the Dean of Academic Affairs of Duke's Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, about which he said, "I look forward to building on the successes of the past to create new opportunities for the future.
Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research from Harvard University, and, most recently, a grant to support the Mellon/Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program from the Mellon Foundation.
Boas delineated previously blurred lines between race, culture, and linguistics and by doing so was able to argue against the comparative method used to support theories of racial inequality.
[9] In July 2006, Baker published an op-ed in The Herald-Sun about a hate crime in Middlesex, North Carolina, in which a cross was burned in a black family's yard.
Focusing on the period between two landmark Supreme Court decisions—Plessy v. Ferguson (the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine established in 1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (the public school desegregation decision of 1954)—Baker shows how racial categories change over time).
Baker also examines key individuals and events that shaped social and anthropological views on race in the decades leading up that period.
[11] In his review of From Savage to Negro, Gerard Fergerson wrote "Baker's study forges new intellectual and political ground" and "enables us to critique the historical relation between race and applied social science.
"[15] The narratives that unfold in the book include stories about specific anthropologists and sociocultural phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance Movement, and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
Baker's book explores the intricate connections shared among these people and events, and the impacts they have made on shaping American ideas of race and culture.
He addresses the different ways in which individuals such as Franz Boas, Frederic W. Putnam, Alice M. Bacon, and Daniel G. Brinton have either accepted or spurned anthropological notions of race and culture.
Brett Williams, professor at American University, wrote, "The book is rich with wonderful stories, again marking Baker's signature engaging style and making it a great read.
"[17] In a review published in American Studies, Vernon J. Williams, Jr., wrote: "Written with an ironic sense of humor, Baker succeeds in ferreting out little known material and enhances and broadens our understanding of the history of anthropology as well as the discipline's relationship to past and present political currents.