AAA cannot be silent today in the wake of George Floyd’s senseless, brutal death in custody and the built up grief, anger, and exhaustion manifest in uprisings across the US recently. In a horrific week when pandemic deaths passed the 100,000 mark, disproportionately affecting black and brown people, and the unemployment rolls swelled by 40 million, again disproportionately affecting black and brown people, certain national leaders have sought to deflect responsibility through false equivalencies and incitement to violence.
The American Anthropological Association reaffirms its commitment to the values of diversity, equity, and human rights. We are outraged and call on our colleagues to channel our personal outrage in the application of our professional research, scholarship, practice, and teaching to participate in overturning the deeply entrenched institutional sources of race-based inequality that are barriers to a more just and sustainable world. We must do better and we can do so together.
