Statement of Solidarity
Statement of Solidarity
The CSULB Geography Department joins the American Association of Geographers and fellow departments within the College of Liberal Arts in condemning the racism, violence, and systemic inequities in the United States that contribute to the disproportionate incarceration and deaths of Black people at the hands of police. We pledge to support our students, faculty, and all activist teacher-scholars in combating anti-Blackness and racism affecting all people of color in all its forms. We stand in solidarity with Black geographers, Black communities, protesters, and especially those who are grieving for the loss of precious lives. Acknowledging the specific histories of Blacks in America, we commit to making Geography a discipline inclusive and equitable for Black geographers and, by extension, all people. We pledge to incorporate into our curriculum and service activities solutions for changing our policing systems, including making CSULB safer and harassment-free for Black students, faculty and staff, and investing in communities of color, especially addressing the enrollment and retention of Black students in Geography and at CSULB. Recognizing that our discipline has been complicit in maintaining racist structures, we commit to using the tools and theories of Geography to expose the systemic spatial inequalities evident today, and, through our curriculum and in solidarity with community organizations, to analyze and generate solutions to systemic patterns of inequality and injustice.
As educators, we share the following resources and collections of readings that center and uplift the scholarship of Black geographers, thinkers, activists, organizers, and allies:
- Reading List of Black Geographers (organized by the University of British Columbia’s Department of Geography)
- Reading for Racial Justice (University of Minnesota Press, Library of Open Access Titles)
- Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (published by Antipode Online)
- Black Lives Matter Micro-Syllabus (organized by the Politics, Groups, and Identities journal)
- The Geography of Despair (or All These Rubber Bullets), by Aretina R. Hamilton
- From Verso Press: Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton; Police: A Field Guide, by David Correia and Tyler Wall; and The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale
- Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, by Andrea J. Ritchie, and associated Study Guide
- The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (documents how race, class, and gender influenced every aspect of the multifaceted U.S. conservation movement from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century)
- Black Nature (a collection of nature themed poems from Black writers across history, edited by poet Camille Dungy)