AAAS Departmentalization (Kristin McFadden and Jameelah Morris

AAAS Departmentalization

By Kristin McFadden and Jameelah Morris

Black Studies is forged out of a set of brutal realities. Black Studies reminds us of the premature death and gratuitous violence Black communities are subjected to, and the ways Black communities have historically and continuously fought back and imagined possibilities beyond this anti-Black state violence. Between 2020 and 2021, the domestic terrorism of white vigilantes and police officers has only escalated: Ma’Khia Bryant, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Monika Diamond, and so many more Black lives were prematurely taken, some of whose names and others whose names we do not. Their murders are only the latest reminders of the ongoing atrocities of the criminal policing system and the reverberating effects of anti-Blackness in the United States. Black Studies scholarship has examined how genocidal assemblages of anti-Blackness and white supremacist violence extend across time and space, and has studied how Black communities, who have engaged in continuous political struggle, have demanded a reckoning with these assemblages as they take shape in every realm of social life. And yet the call to action that is “Black Lives Matter” demands more from allies and supporters than using a hashtag, writing statements, or expressing guilt. It demands concrete measures for redress and restitution.

Especially crucial for the discipline of anthropology is to acknowledge the ways that the discipline has been and continues to be implicated in the project of anti-Blackness and white supremacy.

and white supremacy. Anthropology’s foundational theories, methods, and practices are grounded in epistemologies which have historically had a central role in the denigration and racialized inequalities of Black communities around the world. Black feminist anthropologists writing at the intersection of anthropology and Black Studies like A. Lynn Bolles, Leith Mullings, and Faye Harrison have especially called attention to this legacy and its contemporary manifestations. They additionally demand the end to the marginalization of Black anthropologists and their scholarship, challenging the discipline to re-evaluate its epistemological commitments. As such, there is a long intellectual history of cross-pollination and critique between Black studies and anthropology resulting in critical interventions that have not only contributed to a reevaluation of epistemological and citational commitments, but to theorizations and interrogations of racism and white supremacy within and beyond it.

Black Studies is an interdisciplinary field attuned to the ongoing histories of racial violence, exclusion, and oppression, and works with an understanding of the past and present that does not render the two as siloed entities. Attending to the interconnectedness of the past with our present experiences, Black Studies creates space for us to attend to silence, not just within our historical narratives but also within our present realities. As such, Black Studies centers the epistemologies of Black communities across the globe, recognizing knowledge production as existing both within and outside of the university. Black Studies problematizes mere inclusion within oppressive structures, pushing us to think beyond institutions as our only sites of knowledge production. Moreover, Black Studies scholarship theorizes the ways modernity has been constituted in and by anti-Blackness and rejects tacit assumptions of modernity that do not account for Black life. With particular attention to the nonlinearity of historical progress, and experiences of oppression, dispossession, and resistance across the African Diaspora, Black Studies invites us to theorize the “otherwise.” The “otherwise,” constituted by the no-spaces, the in-between, and the spaces where past and present collide and usurp one another, are the spaces of possibility in Black Studies. Black Studies is testimony to way-making, to demanding and creating space in the way forward despite the violence that encompasses the global project of anti-Blackness.

The Stanford Program in African and African American Studies was born out of an insistence by Black students, faculty, staff, and alumni on creating a space at Stanford that would theorize what it means to be Black in the world. Black students at Stanford in the 1960’s recognized significant gaps in the University curriculum, and more broadly understood their calls for a liberatory education as related to the ongoing struggles for racial justice across the globe. In April 1968, members of the Stanford Black Student Union “took back the mic” from university officials during a university convocation to address Stanford’s response to white racism. The students called for ten demands to be met by the University administration, one of which was to institutionalize African and American Studies. In the fifty years since its creation, the Program in African and African American Studies has been woefully underfunded and under-resourced, despite its important role in Black intellectual development and student life at Stanford.

As a result of years of serious neglect, the AAAS Program has often lacked the resources to offer vitally necessary training in the theoretical and methodological orientations of Black Studies. In recent years, The Black Studies Collective, a graduate student initiative housed within AAAS, has served as a hub for Black Studies on campus, providing a critically important space for graduate students to engage in Black Studies collectively, attending to historical and contemporary discourses within the discipline. Our insistence on the continued presence of Black Studies at Stanford is both a reflection of the legacy of student activism that we are beneficiaries of and a reflection of the transformative interventions it offers in understanding our world. Black Studies is a necessary discipline both at Stanford and in the world at large.

In Summer 2020, The Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and the Black Student Union (BSU) circulated a petition advocating for the Departmentalization of the African and African American Studies Program at Stanford. The petition garnered over 5,000 signatures and reflected decades of organizing work done by students, staff, alumni, and the AAAS Stanford community. 2020 was a significant moment in the fight for AAAS, as Stanford students advocated for Black Studies at Stanford as protestors across the country called for racial justice after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many others both known and unknown.

In Summer 2020, BGSA and BSU released a series of demands in the Stanford Daily that included the University creating a viable path for the departmentalization of the AAAS Program. In response, the University released a plan for a cluster hire of scholars who would focus on “The Impacts of Race in America.” BGSA and BSU rejected this announcement, recognizing its limitations in offering any substantive recognition of Black Studies at Stanford and its inability to honor the long tradition AAAS possesses as a critical scholarly home for students of Black Studies at Stanford. The BGSA Social Action Committee proceeded to launch a series of organizing efforts for the 2020-2021 academic year that aimed to keep AAAS departmentalization at the center of conversations of racial justice and equity at Stanford.

By launching a series of teach-ins, community town halls, and op-eds in the Stanford Daily, we aimed to not only emphasize the long history of AAAS at Stanford but also contextualize the importance of our insistence on a distinctive AAAS department. As members of the Education and Training Sub-Committee of the BGSA Social Action Committee, our efforts focused on emphasizing the intellectual tradition of Black Studies as an interdisciplinary field and the importance of its autonomy from other disciplines. We highlighted both the methodological orientations of Black Studies and its rich theoretical foundation. We aimed to dispel popular notions that Black Studies is “too narrow,” attending to the myriad ways Black Studies intervenes as a discipline to disrupt static conceptions and representations of Black life across the African Diaspora.

Black Studies is necessary to academic life at Stanford, and the University’s recent decision to departmentalize AAAS recognizes that necessity. However, for us, it is important that in that recognition, Stanford provides students who have been organizing for Black Studies clear positions on the committees determining what the AAAS Department will look like. Our work is not done; it is only just beginning. We continue to be engaged in the work of collectively envisioning what a viable Black Studies department might look like at Stanford, and how disciplines like anthropology can support AAAS in substantive ways. It is important that in our conceptions of what an AAAS Department looks like at Stanford, we remain committed to thinking beyond the confines of the University as we continue to fight for liberation in the wake of Black death. Our work will not be complete until the vision of a Department in African and African American Studies is actualized, with the university’s long-term commitment to its success.

With particular attention to anthropology’s historical entanglement with Black Studies, we also recognize that there is significant work to be done within our own department to see Black Studies, and its implementation in anthropological work, as necessary interventions in the discipline. In this moment, we look again to the Black Feminist Anthropological Tradition as a path forward in Anthropology in order to reckon with the experiences of racism and white supremacy Black students frequently face in the discipline and the discipline’s abysmal citation and engagement of the scholarship of Black women. It is our hope that a turn to the urgent and necessary ways Black Studies continues to intervene in anthropological thought and dominant epistemologies will extend beyond this year. The work has barely just begun.