SUNTA stands with all victims of police violence and those on the frontlines demanding justice in this week’s protests.
As a scholarly society committed to social justice, we mourn the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and we reflect on the long history of Black lives lost to racialized state violence.
As a scholarly group devoted to the study of cities, we see a very long legacy of past injustices shaping the present, in how municipal law enforcement across the United States became militarized and insulated from legal action, in how groups and neighborhoods were criminalized, in how policing remains an ever-growing part of government budgets even as other vital human services face cuts and privatization.
Anthropology also offers us examples of the transformative power of protest, and powerful visions of a more just future.
And we raise our professional voice to assert that Black Lives Matter!
– The SUNTA Board