The unjust deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and so many other people of color through police brutality and other symptoms of systemic racism, have devastated our communities. In response, Information Services at Trinity College affirms that Black Lives Matter. It is our responsibility as citizens to eliminate all forms of systemic racism that pervade our society and, as a result, our campus. This work will be neither quick nor easy. Indeed, precisely because of this difficulty we must take it up, recognizing that the work of education cannot be complete until all are free.
As a first step, we express our support for and agreement with President Joanne Berger-Sweeney’s call to action, as well as the Oberlin Group Statement Against Racism, the ALA’s Libraries Respond: Black Lives Matter Plan for Action, and Educause’s Statement on Racial Justice and Recent Events. Although libraries and IT organizations ought to be, and often have been, engines for social change, we have also too often reinforced and even exacerbated the injustice in society writ large. Moving forward, we must work constantly to facilitate social justice. We take that mission seriously.
We look forward to joining in this work with students, faculty, staff, and the broader Trinity community, and encourage members of that broader community to reach out with any ideas on how we can become a more inclusive, equitable institution. We’ve begun with our Antiracism Reading List, and we pledge to support further research into Trinity’s own history and archives. We look forward to working with the Umoja Coalition, whose demands we support. In particular, we commit to diversifying Information Services staff and partnering with Black student organizations to combat systemic racism in our organization.