We stand with Black Lives Matter as cause, as a belief, and as daily action because our country has failed to act upon the social contract that would allow each and every Black person to thrive socially, economically, and politically. We understand that anti-Blackness is a social disease that infects public life and social institutions, including our university and other locations. We understand also that race, ethnicity, economic wellbeing, and public health intersect: COVID-19 disproportionately burdens racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor, the aged, and the disabled. We also understand the ecological decimation leads to more contagions, more violence, more displacement and often is covered over by white entitlement and anger.
We say their names and count the dead: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Stephen Clark, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and too many others. Hispanics are shot at nearly twice the rate of whites; Blacks nearly three times more often.[1] As teachers, scholars, and residents with stand with those who kneel, write, speak, count, join, listen, map, and represent by other divergent means because our core question—what does it mean to write—embraces all forms of expression of racial awareness and justice.
We stand with the Undocumented in our communities and those who cross national and state borders at great risk for work, for family, for health, and to dream of a better way of life, as our families did in earlier generations and moments of immigration history. Though we may celebrate the Supreme Court’s June 2020 decision to stay the canceling of Differed Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), we know that white supremacy and white nationalism will search for other ways to enforce an anti-immigration agenda.
We stand with the LGBTQ+ community at CU and in our neighborhoods near and far because deciding and respecting who and how you love are human rights. They build strong communities, not weaken them, and they foster caring families in perilous times. The LGBTQ+ community has given and will continue to give the world a human truth of inclusion through art, expression, civility and democratic participation.
We stand with those who serve on the front lines of pandemic and those who live with the least amount of economic security as they are often one and the same: those who work in grocery stores, drive trucks, deliver packages, cut the grass, serve our food, build homes, tend the sick, nurse the elderly, sell consumer goods and labor in agriculture. And we stand with faculty and staff at the University of Colorado who will decide, through their actions and choices, the safest, most inclusive, and progressive way forward for our campus community.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-...