English Department Anti-Racism Statement
As we seek to combat racism and the realities of systemic oppression that reach us across many intersectional identities, we offer this statement of solidarity:
We, the English Department at Mount Holyoke College, stand with the Black Lives Matter movement to acknowledge the violent injustices committed against Black people in this country, and we recognize the need to dismantle systems of oppression. We acknowledge that we stand on occupied lands stewarded for millennia by indigenous people, including the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc people of the greater Kwinitekw, or Connecticut River Valley, who are still here calling for justice and a right relationship to the land. We acknowledge the double threat of racism and illness—that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and its social and economic impacts. And we pay our deepest respect to those suffering these inequities and historical injustices by remembering that a great many of us are positioned in privilege.
It is a challenging time for our community of readers and writers at Mount Holyoke. As students of literature, art, and culture, it falls on us to ensure that our words can do more than confer a temporary dignity onto the oppressed only in the hindsight of violence. Language has more impacts than we intend, and we seek to acknowledge, address, and reduce that harm. What new language can that be? Toni Morrison remarks that racism forces language into inexhaustible tragedy: “There will always be one more thing.” Indeed, for every George Floyd and Breonna Taylor we name, there is always more. When our language must be focused on undoing racist lies or naming the violence it causes, Morrison warns that it can diminish our ability to imagine, design, speak, and realize the full humanity of those very individuals who are harmed.
While language can sometimes bind us, it can also be used to imagine a new era. It is not only from the vantage point of historical distance, but especially during moments like this, that your developing skills as majors and minors are called for. Right now, narrative, poetry, film, painting, murals, music, and other artistic and cultural media are needed to communicate the enormously complex business of being human in our world today. Art and literature prompt us to navigate the world carefully, so that we can better understand the histories that got us here. They spur us to contemplate the experiences of others, to measure the stability of our current bases of knowledge, to grow into our ability to know better. As creators, artists, writers, and thinkers, we interpret art and literature purposefully so that we can question our own assumptions and take on new views of the present and the past. These are the pathways that can help us move through difficult times with poised indignation and actionable hope. During this disruption to your regular college experiences, we hope that this can be a time to read, write, create, analyze, and think in order to build the supports for action. When our words do more than belatedly document violence, we can begin to craft a language for freedom, to honor the voices of individuals we have failed to hear, and to repair our frameworks of historical understanding.
This responsibility is ours as a department faculty, too. For years, we have labored to diversify our faculty, to shape a curriculum that gives you access to the literature of people of color in the U.S. and internationally, to queer theory, feminist literature and theory, and more. We continue in our mission to actively reshape our curriculum so that it represents the diversity of literatures written in the English language. Above all, our commitment remains to teach you in the rigorous, exciting, revealing, and challenging fashion as we have always done. Although we know change is slow, we are working hard to incorporate new voices and perspectives into our teaching. There remains much that we as a departmental community still need to do, but we begin again by re-examining our charge—the study and making of literature and art—to imagine that words can do more. The months and years ahead will be filled with continuous challenges for us all, but we are committed to working together to discuss and implement actions aimed to re-examine, diversify, and make change.