Message from the Chair
M e ssa g e f ro m t he C ha i r :
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The past year has been unusually challenging for all of us. The pandemic forced all of us to change our daily rhythms and to live a life online, meeting students, instructors, collaborators, friends and family on our screen. The other major event in 2020 was the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd on a street in Minneapolis. This murder was captured on a cell phone, like many other recent pieces of footage of excessive police violence against Black people in America.
Demonstrations, rallies, and other forms of protest across the country were unprecedented in scope, size, and duration, and they changed the mood and the conversation around race in the US. “It feels different this time,” many said last summer and autumn. Terms like systemic racism, historical injustice, and anti-Blackness were now articulated, if often somewhat awkwardly, by mainstream politicians, corporate leaders, and many others. Many university leaders and officials, also here at Stanford, seized this moment to commit themselves to diversifying faculty and student bodies and to creating a more inclusive environment on campuses across the country. We all hope that this long-overdue effort will bear fruit. One of the first results on this campus was the decision to turn our longstanding program in African and African-American Studies into a fully-fledged department, a decision many of us felt should have been made decades ago. I want to applaud and recognize the important role that many of our students played in that campaign. Many departments, including our own, launched efforts to foreground histories of racial exclusion, anti-Blackness, and historical inequalities across the globe into our curriculum, seminars, discussions, and scholarship. This year’s departmental newsletter has “Race and Anthropology” as its primary theme. Some of the articles in this newsletter provide perspectives on how to study and think of race in anthropology. Others describe events and initiatives in the department addressing race and social justice from a variety of angles.
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