Required reading: 

"You may have seen or heard me say this recently, and I stand by it: If the only way you can celebrate me after I die is by giving more things to cis straight white men, then I ask that you do not celebrate me." 

-Noelle Sawyer (Who will celebrate you?)

"'[Quoting Richard Pratt] The way to civilize an Indian is to get him into civilization. The way to keep him civilized is to let him stay.' So does that sound familiar with regard to diversity and inclusion initiatives we might have heard of?" 

-Belin Tsinnajinnie (Disrupting Settler Colonial Mindsets in Mathematics)

"Many diversity initiatives miss the need for hope to counteract the isolation that non-inclusive spaces create for those who do not belong. I fight to make space for myself, and in doing such I make space for others, and that is how you build diversity."  

-Piper H (Diversity-22)

"We emphasise that our position is political, as is any position on the matter of collaboration with police, whether or not that is made explicit. The JMC arrived at our stance not by finding a mathematical error in the literature on predictive policing algorithms. Our position rests in the political tradition of abolition and an understanding of the historical and present role of the police in maintaining unjust and racist structures of political and economic power." 

-The Just Mathematics Collective (Towards a Mathematics Beyond Police and Prisons)

"Are you concerned about the unregulated kind of retaliation? Right. Isn’t it horrifying how easy it is to sideline an inconvenient person and block their career? How everyone else just goes along with it without asking questions? Isn’t it scary how often the formal procedures merely rubberstamp decisions made elsewhere? How the costs of trying to turn the wheel against the current are so prohibitively high that few attempt it and a “win” is still a loss? That’s the system in which we have had to function all along. Yes, this does happen in mathematics, and here’s much more from academia in general. You’ve been saying that you had no idea, either of the scale of the harassment problem or the silencing and retaliation schemes; but maybe at least on some level you did know, seeing as you are now anticipating with such clarity what might happen to you if the tides were reversed." 

-Izabella Laba (As you do unto us)

"Because we are not mathematical machines.  We live, we breathe, we feel, we bleed.  If your students are struggling, and you don’t acknowledge it, their education becomes disconnected and irrelevant.  Why should anyone care about mathematics if it doesn’t connect deeply to some human desire: to play, seek truth, pursue beauty, fight for justice?  You can be that connection." 

-Francis Su (Mathematics for Human Flourishing)

"One reason that diversifying the faculty is important is that most current faculty are poorly positioned to reform a system that has worked for them. Even those who might be inclined to remove barriers may lack the vision to see that they are there. Representation matters. Ultimately, the way to diversify the academy is to diversify the academy."  

-Matthew Ando (Mandatory diversity statements and faculty hiring)

An excerpt from Dafina-Lazarus Stewart's Minding the Gap: Covering the Distance Between Compositional Diversity and Institutional Transformation:

Diversity and inclusion rhetoric asks fundamentally different questions and is concerned with fundamentally different issues than efforts seeking equity and justice.

• Diversity asks, “Who’s in the room?” Equity responds: “Who is trying to get in the room but can’t? Whose presence in the room is under constant threat of erasure?”

• Inclusion asks, “Has everyone’s ideas been heard?” Justice responds, “Whose ideas won’t be taken as seriously because they aren’t in the majority?”

• Diversity asks, “How many more of [pick any minoritized identity] group do we have this year than last?” Equity responds, “What conditions have we created that maintain certain groups as the perpetual majority here?”

• Inclusion asks, “Is this environment safe for everyone to feel like they belong?” Justice challenges, “Whose safety is being sacrificed and minimized to allow others to be comfortable maintaining dehumanizing views?"

"To everyone who has experienced this— who has felt like they don’t belong or aren’t good enough — the world needs to hear your story. Only then can it begin to give current and future underdogs a better chance at a better life. And just remember: You are good enough. You do belong."  

-David Tran (The hardest part about growing up poor was knowing I couldn’t mess up. Not even once.)