A child observes a moment of silence for Mike Brown on the third anniversary of his death. The memorial photos are of deceased Ferguson activists Darren Seals and Edward Crawford. Canfield Drive, Ferguson, August 9, 2017. (Carolina Hidalgo / St. Louis Public Radio) Given the urgency of these times, can anthropologists afford more talking, conferencing, and filling pages of peer-reviewed journals with work that remains insulated from the daily lives of the world's most marginalized and vulnerable communities? We pondered aspects of this question during the March 2019 anthropology conference “Ethnographic Futures,” cosponsored by the American Ethnological Society, the Association of Black Anthropologists, and the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists. This afterword, in a sense, is a continuation of informal conversations we began at the conference, which was held in St. Louis. It is a collective reflection on the conference and on this special forum of American Ethnologist, “@Ferguson: Still Here in the Afterlives of Death, Defiance, and Joy.” Both projects have inspired us to deliberate on anthropology's ethnographic future. As scholars, we are differently positioned according to our race, gender, research locations, scholarly engagements, teaching styles, and academic homes. We must also acknowledge that precisely because of our positionalities, we not only navigate the academic terrain in different ways but have done so facing specific penalties and privileges that are gendered and racialized. Gina is a Black feminist anthropologist and artist whose publications span a wide range of styles. Her experimental works combine narratives of history, theory, statistics, and chants in performance and visual art to expound on Black diasporic conditions. Ken is a white engaged anthropologist whose long-term work with Chinese immigrants and location at a large public university in New York City have shaped his writing, teaching, and commitment to making anthropology relevant and broadly accessible. We understand some of the discipline's various practices as necessary for the scholarly exchange of ideas; we also recognize that anthropology's practices have value as capital in the market-driven professionalization process. They are also sites, however, of the same disciplining mechanisms that too often refabricate the dominant patterns and hierarchies of and in anthropology. Is it possible for academic conferences, journals, and other public forums to become truly transformative spaces where we can cocreate possibilities for deeper analysis, engagement, collaboration, and even resistance to ignorance, entrenched inequality, and a world that is literally burning and suffering from a global pandemic? The reinvention of anthropology that has been pursued in one form or another over the past three decades cannot be achieved without repositioning praxis as legitimate, desirable, and necessary for the vitality and advancement of anthropological inquiry and knowledge. (Harrison 2008, 65) Indeed, while anthropology has made some theoretical gains, its cultural practices still remain far behind. The structure, content, and form of conferences and journals have been topics of debate, and as Mwenda Ntarangwi (2010) has argued in Reversed Gaze, they reproduce the worst of the discipline's dominant hierarchies. In reflecting on the “Ethnographic Futures” conference and this special issue, we both observed and participated in a significant intervention in the status quo. Activist Rasheen Aldridge protesting near the Ferguson Police Department after Brown's death, August 2014. Aldridge was later appointed by Missouri governor Jay Nixon to serve on the Ferguson Commission, and in 2016 he was elected 5th Ward Committeeman (becoming the youngest elected official in St. Louis history). In January 2020 he became the state representative for the 78th District, replacing activist Bruce “Superman” Franks, who resigned for mental health reasons. In the summer of 2020, Representative Aldridge can still be found on the streets protesting racism, anti-Black violence, and police brutality as a lead organizer for Expect US, a local grassroots organization. (Wiley Price and Lawrence Bryant / St. Louis American) With “Troubling Ferguson” as the theme of the meeting's plenary series, the meeting exemplified a more immediate anthropology that does not shy away from the “urgency of now.” As the introduction to this forum makes clear, St. Louis remained central to the gathering (Parikh and Kwon 2020b). And as reflected in the articles published here, organizers offered participants the opportunity to place their academic work in direct conversation with the region's long history and contemporary realities of racialized violence, racialized spaces, police brutality, and white supremacy, as well as its powerful stories of resistance. Many of us had experienced the Ferguson uprising ignited by Mike Brown's killing only through video clips and hashtags across our social media feeds; at the conference, however, we had the opportunity to hear firsthand from speakers who had been on the front lines of the protests bearing witness in the flesh. Not only did the conference take as its framework the fatal police shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, but as forum editors Shanti Parikh and Jong Bum Kwon note, it also placed this brutality within the context of the long-durée of racial terror and history of community-based opposition (Parikh and Kwon 2020a). This deep engagement with issues of race, racism, history, power, and violence created and maintained a space both cerebral and visceral, one in which participants could converse about the ethnographic, historical, and contemporary realities of St. Louis. Gina. I was especially struck by the substantial presence of minoritized participants in St. Louis. The normative Eurocentric white male and cis-gender female were edged out by an embodied intersectionality—a generational, racial, gender, sexuality representation that was blatantly obvious. This richness of difference was not limited to attendees. The organizers brought a curatorial sensibility that provided both an interdisciplinary range of perspectives and a scholarly cohesiveness, which set this meeting apart. Ferguson residents and community organizers spoke for themselves, displacing the common role of the anthropologist as mediator and sole interpreter. This was rare since through much of the discipline's history, Black folks concerned with structural conditions afflicting their communities had to find intellectual homes in other disciplines (Baker and Patterson 1994; Drake 1978; Harrison and Harrison 1999). As I posted on Twitter, “I thought I died and went to Decolonizing Anthropology Heaven, but realized I was at the AES conference in St Louis.” This was the first time in my career in this discipline that I did not feel like an interloper. Ken. The conference concluded with a provocative series of three plenaries, entitled “Troubling Ferguson and Beyond,” that drew together practitioners, activists, and academics to consider the (re)production of anti-Black and anti-brown state violence, various contestations, and possible futures in this troubled moment in divided cities. During the Q&A after the final plenary, I felt compelled to urge our fellow participants to recognize the unique character of the conference, particularly its diversity and its shaking up of patterns of white normativity so prevalent in our academic spaces. The power emerged at the intersections: AES, ABA, and ALLA cosponsorship and leadership; local community activists and academics; race, gender, and sexuality; graduate students and senior scholars; personal stories, rich ethnographies, and innovative theoretical work. What would it take to continually re-create this experience in our other professional institutional spaces? The conference in St. Louis provided a brief respite from our discipline's whiteness and the white normativity of its internal cultural practices in concrete and profound ways. But it also exposed the all too common realities of our institutional life and pushed us to see glimpses of what can be alternative, liberative, and generative in our ethnographic futures. We are Mike Brown. Protect me. Don't shoot me. I hear this ticking sound. My friends deserve to feel as safe and respected as I do. Messages displayed on signs during the Ferguson uprising in 2015 “Ethnographic Futures” was a pathbreaking conference that assembled a diverse array of voices that pushed disciplinary boundaries and shattered any imagined wall between community and academy. Yet the forum goes far beyond this. Through a series of essays combined with prose, poetry, and photography, readers get a window into the textured and nuanced demands for justice long deferred. Reading the forum is required but inadequate. It must be seen, felt, lived with to capture the death, the defiance, the joy, and the hope. Reading the forum may be jarring for those whose lives are spared such violence. It will disrupt. That is the aim. It ought to make those shielded uncomfortable. It might, as activist Alexis Templeton (2020, 164) writes, get you to “stand in our shoes for a moment.” Place matters in this forum. Given this journal's adherence to ethnographic conventions, “@Ferguson” rightfully and purposely seeks to “unsettle the discipline” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). The editors of this forum bring forth conversations that not only have been habitually confined to Black and ethnic studies and other disciplines but are also crucial to grasp the breadth of what they call Ferguson's afterlife. It raises the question, Does anthropology bear some responsibility to this afterlife? How might anthropologists meet that challenge? The conference and forum, we believe, offer an example. With its documentation of ongoing racial terror in analytic, poetic, and visual forms, the forum gives readers an intimate sense of daily life under precarity, integrating visceral experiences that are too often absent from structural analyses. The editors remind us that despite national coverage, Ferguson has become a taboo topic in St. Louis as young activists from the uprising have, over the past five years, mysteriously died one by one. Remembering, they tell us, is a political act (Parikh and Kwon 2020b, 116). This is a public anthropological archive of a community's angst, vulnerability, and commitment to being routinely present in the face of state terror. Ferguson's activists demand that government officials not only do their jobs but be held accountable in a milieu mired in a complicated racial and political geography (Boyles 2020). A child observes a moment of silence for Mike Brown on the third anniversary of his death. The memorial photos are of deceased Ferguson activists Darren Seals and Edward Crawford. Canfield Drive, Ferguson, August 9, 2017. (Carolina Hidalgo / St. Louis Public Radio) There are maps of all kinds in this forum. #ChalkedUnarmed, for example, is a photo series created by Mallory Rukhsana Nezam (2015) to educate passersby about the extrajudicial killings of unarmed minorities and to honor the dead. The project is reminiscent of the 1951 Civil Rights Congress petition to the United Nations, “We Charge Genocide.” The photographs, iconic and atypical, evoke what remains at stake. As Odis Johnson (2020) writes, the pattern of St. Louis law enforcement is rooted in a historical legacy of anti-Blackness that codifies Black people as perceived threats. As antithesis, whiteness entails a social luxury of being that allows well-meaning whites to view their whiteness as an intolerable moral problem, for which they ultimately seek Black absolution (Kwon 2020a, 2020b). The divides may be entrenched, yet there are some crossings. Templeton reflected on the painful politics of being a queer leader during the Ferguson uprising and on finding a more concrete sense of self through engaging in direct action. Direct action, Templeton (2020, 164) writes, “is a form of communication,” one that “brings what one ignores to the surface.” Chelsea Carter's (2020) reflections on negotiating activism and graduate school recall the implications of anthropology's resistance to doing work at home in the United States. Indeed, “anthropologizing America,” as Orvar Löfgren (1989) dubbed it, still reveals a long-standing professional tension—the attachment to “over there” as the valid site of ethnographic research. Not all anthropologies or anthropological works are viewed as equal. This is especially so when the work is being conducted by minoritized people who, by virtue of their ontological status, are viewed as less legitimate. As the AES, ALLA, and ABA joint 2019 meeting and special forum were organized, anthropologists elsewhere and in other venues were asking similar questions about the consequences of race and racism. As we write this afterword, American Anthropologist, the discipline's other flagship journal, has published a special section, “Anthropology of White Supremacy” (Beliso–De Jesús and Pierre 2019). Meanwhile, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, has also published a special section, “Race in Europe” (Balkenhol and Schramm 2019). People are in conversation both directly and indirectly. The American Anthropology Association's 2020 annual meeting—which would have been held in St. Louis and chaired by Bianca Williams if not for the global Covid-19 pandemic—issued a call for papers with the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” This call asks the discipline “to bear witness, take action and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms and possibilities.” Ken. I grew up in some very segregated Florida towns. My feminist single mother had lived in India, China, and the Philippines and learned multiple languages. We were strangers in most places. The KKK burned a cross on our lawn in one small town because of her interracial work. Twisted men called at night to spew sexually explicit hate. I learned the risks of challenging the dominant racial and gender hierarchies, even for a white family. After college and an internship in China, I worked on a racially and culturally diverse team at an international nonprofit. My experiences there—the friendships, the conversations, the challenges—were transformative and hope-filled. I thought I would find the same in anthropology. And I did in some places. But too often I have found that our US professional spaces fail to achieve a transformative diversity and to move beyond white normative cultural practices. By this I mean the practices in our professional spaces—sections, elections, conferences, meetings, departments, hiring processes, tenure decisions, and retention of minoritized faculty. In these practices white cultural assumptions—norms, values, language, symbols, mental maps of reality, and systems of power—are reinscribed and asserted in ways that work, often unconsciously, against anthropology's self-described goals of diversity, inclusion, equity, and transformation. For a moment in St. Louis in spring 2019 and now reading this forum, I have the feeling of something different, of the possibility of opening up truly liberative spaces within our discipline, spaces for friendships, conversations, challenges, and collaborations. But are these just moments, or are they true markers in a process of decolonizing anthropological spaces? Gina. In these political times, as our humanity is routinely questioned, I certainly hope that these publications and gatherings are not isolated pursuits. Are we witnessing a new momentum that could potentially indicate a shift? Decolonization is an ongoing process. The history of anthropology's complicity in white supremacy, or “anthropology as white supremacy,” as Beliso–De Jesús and Pierre (2019) rightfully name it, forces us all to confront a truism not often discussed in mixed company. Simply put, the discipline has advanced in many ways. Yet it has failed to build an equitable human assertion for all people, to paraphrase the late Amiri Baraka (1969, 39). So, the crucial question is, Who else will carry on this work? Like the activism that has been confronting injustices head-on, these projects are primarily led by minoritized folks, often women. That division of labor (epistemic, affective, and otherwise) from which white people have and continue to benefit, precisely because of the “convenience of the unmarked” (Trouillot 2003, 73), remains racially unequal. It is undisputed that we minorities have done more than our share. With an ever-increasing socioeconomic gap and abuses of political power ushering in dystopian futures, I take a cue from D. Soyini Madison (2010, 98) in committing to “those everyday acts of resistance that build and matter and make change happen.” The conference and special issue as ethnographic projects are now part of a long history of forebears who have struggled to confront racial terror in theory and practice. They remind us why anthropology matters. We are grateful to the organizers and participants of the AES/ABA/ALLA spring meeting and the editors and contributors to this forum for calling into being a liberative expression of a collective ethnographic future. So here we are just one year after the conference living in the midst of a global pandemic that is exposing deep structures of inequality and political vulnerability on a global scale. What does Ferguson teach us? In the aftermath of George Floyd's horrific murder, the uprising continues. This time it is global with more vigor and broader-base participation. The fierce urgency of now is an invitation. In this ongoing movement toward decolonization within and beyond the academy, we believe there is synergy and momentum that may open more possibilities to address and redress the deep and fundamental contradictions in anthropology and their lived consequences.