Enfilade

HECAA’s board sent the following message to its membership on Tuesday, 6 April 2021, with an eye toward starting a conversation at the annual business meeting at ASECS (online) on Saturday at 3:55pm:

In the wake of the recent deadly attacks in Atlanta, and in the face of systemic racism and persistent xenophobia inside and outside our discipline, the board of HECAA offers the following statement of solidarity.

We condemn anti-Asian violence in all its forms and deplore the historical imbalances of power that have enabled racist violence to go unaddressed for so long. We stand in solidarity with our Asian, Asian-American and Pacific Islander students and colleagues, offering our gratitude to those who have reached out to share their experiences of racism in academia and the world at large. As historians of the eighteenth century, we acknowledge our responsibility to address not only the racism present in the world today, but also its eighteenth-century roots. In the face of continued intolerance, we dedicate ourselves to the work of educating ourselves, our students, and our communities about the historical origins ongoing legacy of racial prejudice, affirming our commitment to HECAA as an open and inclusive forum for scholarship and intellectual exchange.