Editors' Introduction: Structural Racism, Whiteness, and the African Studies Review

Like many people over the past months, we have spent time reflecting on our own racism and the racist structures which we inhabit and recreate. In the wake of the horrific public murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, the murder of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville, Kentucky, the startling videoed lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Atlanta by white suburbanites, the death of Adama Traoré in police custody in Paris, and the impunity following these and countless other killings of Black Americans, Diasporic Africans, and African migrants almost too numerous to list, there has been an outpouring of grief and anger. We stand in solidarity with Black communities around the world. Black Lives Matter. As a premier journal of African Studies, we also must make it our motto: Black Voices Matter.

Almost two years have passed since the then-president of the African Studies Association (ASA) Jean Allman delivered a damning account of the history of institutional racism within the structural apparatuses of the ASA [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSb_N2Ly8VY&t]. Allman's research revealed how, since its very foundation, African-American members were first marginalized, then displaced from the ASA; how African participation was discounted and dismissed; and how specific institutions, such as the hallowed prizes, routinely overlooked or ignored the contributions of people of color, while simultaneously honoring egregious perpetrators of racist exclusivity. Allman invited former members who quit the ASA in the 1970s to hear and respond to her reevaluation. The print version [https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2019.40] of Allman's keynote is one of our most read and cited articles in recent years. It is a poignant reminder that, even today, the ASA and its institutions can be for many scholars of color an unfriendly and unwelcoming space. There is indeed much "unfinished business," from 1968, from earlier, and certainly from the present. It also reminds us that it is very difficult to break free from the structures that produce us. We are well situated to acknowledge the pervasiveness of racism and white supremacy in our societies, in academia, and in the publishing world.

In its various iterations, the ASR has been hosted by a number of institutions, beginning at Northwestern University, then moving to the University of California, Berkeley, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, then Boston University, Michigan State University, the University of Florida, the University of Southern California, and more recently, the Five Colleges. The ASR has a long history of privileging white and predominantly male anglophone voices. Since its foundation as the Bulletin of the ASA in 1958 by Melville Herskovits, the journal has had fourteen editors, all white Americans. The sole exception was the Ghanaian anthropologist Maxwell Owusu, who served as Associate Editor for two years in the early 1970s. It was not until 1972 that scholars from African institutions appeared on the Editorial Board. For three years, S. A. Aluko at the University of Ife and Taye Gulilat at Haile Selassie I University served on the Editorial Board. Between 1975 and 1998, however, no African scholar was part of the team, and the Editorial Board was subsequently disbanded. When it was reconstituted in the new millennium, an African and Africa-based presence was restored to the journal supervision.

Insofar as the ASR is one of the key ASA institutions, a reevaluation of the racial dynamics of the journal's operations is long overdue. As we look back at the emergence of the ASR as a key voice in African Studies, we recognize errors, erasures, and racism as consubstantial to the history of ASR. And we take responsibility for the ways that the journal is part of the deep-seated problem of whiteness and anti-Black racism occupying African studies. For almost sixty years, it has been led almost exclusively by white voices. Informed by this current climate of personal and national reckoning, the ASR will be instituting a number of new initiatives and reforms to our operations over the next few months.

The Editorial Collective will appoint a taskforce of prominent African Studies scholars to investigate institutional...