Statement from MIT Anthropology
In the midst of Covid-19’s unfolding and unequal death tolls and of ongoing police, state, and everyday violence against Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous communities in the United States and elsewhere, we in MIT Anthropology stand against racist white supremacy, believing, with anthropologist Leith Mullings, that
“[A]nthropology is uniquely positioned to make a decisive contribution to the critical interrogation of contemporary racism. With its emphasis on underlying social relations and the informal workings of structures, networks, and interactions that produce and reproduce inequality, anthropology has a set of theoretical perspectives and a methodological tool kit that lends itself to interrogation of new forms of structural racism and to unmasking the hidden transcripts of the process through which difference is transformed into inequality.”
Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology, 2005
We are dedicated to naming and fighting racism as an institutional and structural form of inequality and violence – work we seek to do in our teaching, our research, and our administrative practice. This is work, too, that depends upon a multiracial, feminist, and queer determination to support and amplify the works and voices of students, faculty, and staff of color.
