dear english students and Alumni,
As a department, we recognize that faculty and students of color have long navigated
a racist system built upon and maintained by rhetorical and physical violence against
their populations and upheld today by white silence. Discussing race and our country’s
racist legacy has long been a matter of survival for some citizens, and a voluntary
choice for others. To ensure transformative justice, white folks can no longer choose
to ignore how we/they are implicated in the oppression and silencing of our/their
fellow community members. Assuming a collective “we” can flatten existing power relationships,
but in this case, we have collective work to do.
Committing to anti-racism on a rhetorical level is an important starting point, but
we believe there are specific anti-racist strategies we might employ at the departmental
level to begin dismantling the system itself. Discussions are underway across the
department to determine how we can make change collectively and concretely. This work
is ongoing. These are the commitments we have come up with so far:
- We commit to offering a high percentage of readings by BIPOC and gender diverse authors. Working towards parity in our syllabi will amplify the voices of the oppressed, while
also encouraging a relational and intersectional understanding of how BIPOC, gender
diverse people, and white people navigate—and thus interpret—the world differently
because of existing power relationships.
- Over this summer we will open up conversation through a regularly occurring anti-racist email Drawing from
our various research lenses, individual faculty members will illuminate and interrogate
specific components of systemic racism we’ve thought a lot about, while including
something for you to read, listen to, or view on the topics of structural racism and
state violence. Current students: please check your MCLA emails regularly. If you
are alumni, please email Office Manager Stacy Gagne at stacy.gagne@mcla.edu to be included on the email digest.
- We acknowledge that institutions of higher learning are often underscored by the very
social inequities that they often seek to study and transform. We commit to evaluating and assessing how our department serves the mission of public
education by engaging in individual and collective teaching practices that best uphold
the communities that we serve.
- Most importantly, we promise to listen. We encourage you to reach out with any ideas for ways we can stand together as a
department.
In solidarity, your professors,
Caren Beilin
Mike Birch
Amber Engelson
Zack Finch
David Langston, Emeritus
Victoria Papa
Jenna Sciuto
J. Antonio Templanza
Darren Johnson
Anne Zepernick
