Statement on Anti-RacismEnglish

The English Department condemns the brutal murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department. We condemn the U.S. heritage of racialized violence that continues in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder. At times like these, protest is not optional but compulsory. The criminal justice system in the U.S. is racist with modern police forces arising out of vigilante groups that hunted down escaped slaves. We know that a transformative rethinking of the police is long overdue. Given our privileged positions at a liberal arts college, we must combat the systemic racism of all U.S. institutions, whether political, economical, governmental, cultural, and/or educational; otherwise, our very democracy is threatened, and education is hampered in its role of developing global citizens committed to racial and economic justice.

The English Department at Gustavus Adolphus College proposes the following:

  • The English Department commit to anti-racist pedagogy and decolonize the curriculum.

  • We will seek input from students of color on topics, texts, and approaches to literature, film, history, and culture. We will make mistakes and invite students of color to intervene when we do so; and

  • We will teach canonical texts from a non-white/non-canonical perspective and we will unpack the concept of canon itself for its colonialist privileging of whiteness.

  • The English department will improve our ways of advising and mentoring students of color and develop recruitment strategies that attract students of color to the English major and minor.

  • English department members will accept only those service roles that address anti-racism.

  • The English Department will propose a minor or concentration in Global Englishes, with an emphasis on anti-racism and Black Lives Matter.

  • Focus Bards in the Arb exclusively on Black writers for the next three years and continue to emphasize writers of color thereafter, so that Gustavus’s premier showcase of artists, poets, and scholars publicly represents the English Department’s commitment to anti-racism to both the campus and the wider community.

  • We strongly urge the creation of a Faculty of Color Endowed Chair named after Phil Bryant with Bryant as the inaugural professor.