Anthropology

Faculty Statement: Against Racial Injustice

We anthropologists of the University of California in Berkeley stand with those who condemn the suffocating weight of racial violence applied year after year to the lives and aspirations of black Americans; we express our outrage at seeing the breath of black Americans snatched away yet again by public noose and police knee; and we forcefully denounce a system of white supremacy that shields the lives and livelihoods of white citizens by throwing its black and brown citizens to the ravages of economic collapse and the entrenched biases of a health care system driven by corporate interests. As anthropologists and educators, we reaffirm our commitment to an anti-racist pedagogy and to the goal of bringing about the end of the structures of racial inequality that pervade American society and that culminate both in the mass incarceration of black Americans and in wanton acts of murder by officials working on behalf of the American state. As human beings, we despair of these killings and demand justice.