2 minute read
President's Welcome
A MESSAGE FROM PRESIDENT AMILCAR SHABAZZ
Last year our conference took place in Atlanta just as COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. It has been a year for the record books. As of the time of my writing this message the planet has had nearly 117 million Coronavirus cases with more than 2.5 million deaths. In the United States, we’ve had about 30 million people get the disease and almost 600,000 people dying from it. COVID-19 has struck members of the NCBS and our families. It has disproportionately devastated “people from racial and ethnic minority groups” and has deepened our attention to issues of equity, especially health equity, in this time of profound “racial reckoning” in the wake of the tragic murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others. We are all hurting and we are all in this fight for our lives together. In this context, our conference unfolds in a virtual way, is free to all, is without our regular Call for Papers, and has as its theme: “Radically Reimagining and Remaking the World: Black Studies and Black People in Reflection, Reaffirmation, and Resistance.” The social relations of this world must be remade! COVID-19 teaches us that on so many levels and has forced the entire planet to recognize our interconnectedness. The better world that is possible requires some new freedom dreams that are radical and based upon our collectively being deeply reflective about how far we have come, where we are and how far we have yet to go. The NCBS supports the entire Africana Studies community worldwide. We are the scholars who have worked to correct the historical record, fired the cultural imagination through our creative work, and have done and are doing the scientific investigations about black lives that have helped to make a way for the “racial reckoning” and the uprising against anti-black racism. We have so much more work to do. I have been a part of the reparations struggle ever since I first heard and met Queen Mother Moore in New Orleans in 1981. She sparked my awareness of the debt our people are owed and Sister Dara Abubakari, Brother Imari Obadele, Comrade-Attorneys Chokwe Lumumba and Nkechi Taifa and many others developed my consciousness and encouraged me to put out a little book called The Forty Acres Documents back in 1994. Now we see that this year H.R.40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act has a real chance to be enacted into law.
When the legislation passes, it will create a commission of more than a dozen experts to review the United States government’s role in supporting enslavement of African Americans from the country’s colonial background down to 1865. It will give Congress a set of recommendations about ways to both educate the country about the legacy of slavery as well as how to alleviate its intergenerational harms. I call on the NCBS to support the enactment HR/S 40. Please enjoy this virtual conference and give us feedback. We plan to have a Call for Papers next year but in online mode, so write to us at info@ncbsonline.org and volunteer to work with our various committees to bring your issues, interests and ideas to fruition. Invite us to your campus to speak and to meet with members of your community. NCBS is here for you year-round.
