On Behalf of Our Critical Ethnic & Community Studies Program Students, Faculty and Staff
We join our voices to the multitudes across the U.S. and around the world, sharing our grief and outrage at the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others by law enforcement officers.
We protest the criminalization of Black lives and the murders that result from anti-blackness, racialized and militarized policing.
We are a program that builds knowledge for solidarity, social justice, and personal and political transformation. We work transnationally and engage transdisciplinary approaches in partnership with diverse students, communities and academic disciplines.
We affirm our determination to do everything in our power, as educators, advocates and organizers, to help end this epidemic of police violence directed at Black lives.
The most recent police killings come at a time when the COVID19 pandemic is causing disproportionately higher death rates in Black, Latinx and Native communities. Asian American communities have especially been the target of racialized attacks tied to fear mongering sparked by the pandemic. These are the neighborhoods in which our UMASS Boston faculty, students and community partners live, work, risk their lives, and strive for a better future. Mobilizing cultural heritage and inspiring strengths, our communities raise their families and achieve their dreams in the face of unacceptable racial, economic, gendered and anti-immigrant bias and oppression.
We affirm our determination as a program to center our work on uncovering, challenging and transforming the ways racism and other forms of intersecting inequalities operate as social determinants of convergent public health emergencies for cisgender and trans* Black, Latinx, Native, Asian American and other communities of color.