06/17/2020
The HGSO concurs with the KU History Department faculty and staff in their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The study of history is a practice in empathy, and while not all of us have had to reckon firsthand with the constant and daily inequities of an unjust system simply because of the color of our skin, we must empathize with those who endure these injustices and use our discipline to further the cause of racial equality.
If you would like to further support the movement, we have included a list of organizations that you can donate to in solidarity:
ACLU
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Black Voters Matter Fund
The Bail Project
The Equal Justice Initiative
- The HGSO Board
Statement from the Department of History, June 2020
We stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, with Black and Brown faculty, staff, students, and friends, and with all who have experienced racism and other forms of injustice.
As people around the globe come together in their communities to protest yet another murder of an unarmed Black person, we are filled with sorrow, anger, and a common desire to bring our collective knowledge of the past to bear on understanding and solving the deep-rooted problems of the present. The senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd is but one among so many tragic deaths, including the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade, that have repeatedly demonstrated the strong current of institutional and individual racism that continues to undermine the principles of our justice system and the ideals of American democracy. Policing organizations in the United States are not the only institutions that are shaped by or operate with racial bias. The high mortality rates due to COVID-19 among African American and Native American citizens demonstrate other dimensions of systemic racism, such as inequities in access to medical, financial, and educational resources, that perpetuate structural inequalities on our campus, in Kansas and in the United States. In addition, recent attacks on Asian Americans and Asians living in the United States and the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric serve as further evidence of entrenched racist attitudes among the American public. All of this is rooted in our respective pasts – as members of university, state, national, and international communities. None of this is acceptable.
To study history in the twenty-first century is to not only learn more about who we are, but to acknowledge the stories of people who have been silenced and excluded from history books. Their voices matter. Their histories matter. We see our role as professors as a chance to engage students in a respectful understanding of the diversity of past peoples and events in hopes that we all grow in creating tolerant, equitable communities in the United States and around the globe. We commit to redoubling our efforts to use our intellectual resources to excavate the history of institutional racism and participate in a much-needed and long-overdue period of listening and learning from one another. We will continue to try, as we move forward, to use that knowledge to shape the kinds of fundamental changes that are required to eliminate the institutionalized inequality that undergirds racist acts and beliefs. We extend an open invitation to students and the KU community to join us in our classrooms and public presentations as we study, listen, and reflect on our troubling past in order to remake the present and advocate for future justice.
Signed by faculty and staff of the Department of History, University of Kansas
