 I am truly a born-again anthropologist, but in my heart, I'm first and foremost a poet. And so I'd like to close with a bit of poetry. This is poem for my black anthropology sisters today and forever. And what I want to do is to begin with the epigram. One of the things I began with was a quote that I found in Zora. And she quotes it in her essay called What White Publishers Won't Print that was originally published in 1970. And this is the quote she uses. We don't know who the author of it is, but it says, quote, yes, he can certainly know his higher mathematics and he can read Latin better than any white man I know, but I cannot bring myself to believe that he understands a thing he is doing. It is all an aping of our culture, all on the outside. You're crazy if you think that has changed him inside in the least. Turn him loose and he will work at once back to the jungle. He is still a savage and no amount of translating Virgil and Ovid is going to change him. In fact, all you have done is to turn a useful savage into a dangerous beast, end quote. They see us as dangerous beast. They treat us as if we don't belong intruders, if you will, occasionally we are mentored but when we rise above our mentors as brilliant people want to do, they try to push us back down. Pull us on to lockdown. Sometimes the threats that block us from achieving to our fullest potential may even come from people who look like us, skin folk as Sister Burkett Williams labeled them. Even from other women who may turn out not to be skin folk, not to be supporters but negators, haters in today's parlance, who would rather see us all fall than one of us, especially one of us of color rise above the crowd. No feminist anthropology scholars you still don't cite us as Sister Lynn Bowles and Sister Fay Harrison continue to remind us. You still don't use our books, our words and experiences as black women and women of color are not part of the canon of must read feminist literature. Occasionally and on certain occasions, one or two of us, never more, are given the key to the intellectual Sister John but at what price anthropology tells its own history of women in the discipline. We valorize and elevate, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ellen Q. Parsons, but that history even when viewed through a feminist lens continues to turn its intellectual back on Zora Neale Hurston and on us, her intellectual progeny. As I have traveled and been fortunate to move around this country and the world, I've encountered a fair share of my black sister anthropologist, my sister of color anthropologist, my LGBT sister anthropologist. I have inscribed on my heart these sister's narratives of how we continue to struggle against being labeled dangerous intelligent beasts. We labor as our mothers and relatives before us without much support in the fields of academic departments, planting and tending the crops of anthropology and women's studies and black studies where far too often, though not always, but far too often are treatment is barely one step above academic sharecropping. Where we are forced to feel indebted and grateful if granted tenure as if we had not earned our place. They treat us like dangerous beasts and make us feel routinely as if we don't belong. They block us from the professional mobility we have earned. They intervene and still are best students. They ignore our contributions to the growth of the departments until someone else who does not look like us recycles our very same idea and then it is viewed as brilliance. We are tired. We are sick and tired of being treated like dangerous beasts. We are your former students. We are your colleagues. And some of us thought we were your friends. Is into this field that black feminist anthropology makes its grand entrance. It is a collection of testimonies, a personal and professional witnessing. It is an archive of our black women's resistance and resiliency in the field of anthropology. It is our historical anthropological legacy. It is our small but powerful contribution to the ongoing tradition of cultural critique and anthropology in general and feminist anthropology. Specifically, it is our righteous way of saying we are here to stay. Deal with us. But with justice, with equality and above all else with respect. But deal, you must. But most importantly, it is a survival guide for black feminist everywhere. Doesn't matter the discipline, this book is for you. May it be your intellectual guide. May it be your spiritual support. May it remind you of the transitions, the traditions from which you have evolved. May it provide you the ammunition and the ambition to challenge those who dare stand in your way. To black feminist and anthropology and everywhere else. This book of black feminist anthropology, theory, politics, proxies and poetics is our gift to you. The gift of nine black feminist sisters brave enough to bear our souls and share with you the truth of our lives. Our research and our experiences with anthropology and feminism. Cherish the gift. May it give you strength but above all else. Remember, it is our legacy to you. Add to it, strengthen it and pass it forward. Thank you. Thank you.