Dear SOAN students and friends,
This week, following the “active shooter” Campus Alert, has been difficult for our community.
While the administration has taken preliminary action, many of our students voice despair, exhaustion and concern that this will be “swept under the rug” or forgotten in the excitement of graduation and the lull of summer. We feel compelled to issue this commitment to you and to ourselves as a community.
We all have obligations to each other and to society. As those trained to think and act critically about issues of injustice and inequality, we are deeply troubled that certain bodies were imperiled, that whole communities were multiply traumatized, often in ways that others cannot fully grasp. Although we are encouraged that President Casey and many others are responding swiftly and concretely, we are once again reminded that our institution has a lot of urgent work to do. This event was not the result of one or a few individuals. We must work together to dismantle white supremacy on our campus. Colgate’s sociologists and anthropologists pledge to press our teaching, our curriculum, and our other activities on campus to this task, in every way we can imagine.
We ask that our administrators continue with, and scale up their efforts to address real change on this campus. We ask that Colgate faculty and students continue to interrogate and resist injustice, violence, exclusion and dehumanization in the spaces we occupy across campus and in our communities. All of us have a responsibility to work against arrangements that divide community members from each other and enforce intersecting hierarchies of oppression.
In solidarity,
Members of the SOAN Department
