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SASS Supports Black Lives Matter

The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study wishes to express our outrage over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others, and to stand in solidarity with people of color who have been abused, oppressed, or murdered in the long and tragic history of white supremacy. Over the centuries, police brutality and racially motivated violence have played a key role in oppressing African Americans and other people of color in the United States. We condemn the systemic racism that pervades American culture and our criminal justice system and assert our strongly held conviction that Black lives matter.

As an academic organization, we acknowledge that the academy has often been complicit in white supremacy, and that hostility towards African Americans, indigenous peoples, and other people of color continues to pervade our academic structure. We commit ourselves to working to change that. We represent scholars dedicated to the study of the history and cultures of the Nordic region, an area of the world that is inextricably connected, both willingly and unwillingly, to the development of the inherent power structures that form the basis of inequity and injustice throughout the world. We acknowledge that it is our responsibility as scholars to pursue questions of race and inequality, seeking to expand the depth and breadth of our knowledge and to work to address these issues. We call on the members of SASS and colleagues across the Humanities to actively work to dismantle the systems of racism and oppression that not only pervade our country and the world, but also our universities, our research, and our classrooms. We can and must do better. 

For those looking to assist in the current moment, we provide a list of organizations that are taking immediate action to support the protestors who have been arrested: https://bailfunds.github.io/