Our Commitments to the Black Community and to Racial Justice
- June 13, 2020
We write this note to our colleagues at Georgetown – students, staff, and faculty. And to our partners in the broader Washington, D.C. community and across the educational landscape. We write especially to Black members of our communities and to our allies across campus to say that we hear you, we see you, and we stand in solidarity with you. Black lives matter to us. Your lives matter to us. We believe that this time demands stark clarity, humility, honesty, and a serious commitment to action.
So we say:
- We are appalled at the violence in our society perpetrated against Black people.
We denounce the physical violence enacted against countless Black people daily and the recent murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade.
- We grieve that the two pandemics of coronavirus and racial violence are most damaging to the safety, health, and livelihoods of our Black communities.
- We know that these are only a small subset of the many manifestations of the corrosive structural racism in our society.
- We own that this structural racism is not only pervasive within higher education generally but also underlies the existence of highly selective institutions like Georgetown.<br>
We acknowledge it is this generation’s responsibility to respond to the failure to make progress against systemic racism and its devastating economic, educational and health impacts on the Black community.
We denounce the physical violence enacted against countless Black people daily and the recent murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade.