Black Lives Matter Statement of Support
The American Theatre and Drama Society stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement and with the fight for justice and equity in the United States, the American hemisphere, and the world.
We grieve George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Manuel Ellis, and many, many others. We are enraged by their murders at the hands of police officers.
We are incensed by the racialized inequity of COVID-19 and its disproportionate toll in Black communities, poor communities, and communities of color.
The U.S. has long profited from a normalized disposability of Black life; profoundly racialized economic inequity; and modernity’s systemic occlusion of its dependence on coloniality. We maintain that structural and systemic inequity connects the fight for Black life with the fight for lives of color, for lives of the global majority, for the lives of poor, trans, indigenous, immigrant, queer, female, and disabled communities in the U.S. and the world.
As an organization dedicated to the study of theatre, drama, and performance in and of the Americas, our mission demands that we face these oppressions and acknowledge our part in them.
We pledge our resources to educating ourselves; interrogating, naming, and dismantling our privileges; rooting out anti-Blackness in our field and practices; and amplifying Black voices and voices of color in our scholarship, teaching, administration, and theatre-making. We pledge to articulate actionable tasks. This statement cannot and will not substitute for action.
We recognize that the American Theatre and Drama Society is a majority white organization. We recognize that Black artists and scholars and neighbors have been doing and living this work for generations and are often called upon to educate their white colleagues. We maintain that it is white responsibility to educate themselves and each other.
We share the below list to amplify Black voices, and to offer resources, funds, and organizations that we can assist or that can assist us in anti-racism work. This list is neither complete nor exhaustive.
Thank you to ATDS officers and board members for helping write this statement. Thank you to The Bushwick Starr, Tufts Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, and the Theater Department of Skidmore College for sharing resources and language with ATDS.
Resources:
Black Mama’s Bail Out – National Bail Out
Communities United Against Police Brutality
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Rachael Cargle – The Great Unlearn
Additional ATDS Antiracist and BLM Resources
EDUCATE YOURSELF AND OTHERS
Read, Learn, and Listen to Black Lives Matter Organizers (Movement for Black Lives, M4BL). For years, they have had clear plans, goals and demands for the survival of Black people. Talk about what is happening with family and friends, which are sometimes the hardest conversations to have.
- Support the Movement for Black Lives (M4LB)
- Alicia Garza: A Herstory of the Black Lives Matter movement
- The Reader Guide to understanding Police Abolition
- What White People Can do for Racial Justice
- A.R.T.’s Diana Oh’sWhite People Read: Reading List
- Anti-racism resources
Black Lives Matter Resources Toolkit
https://blacklivesmatter.com/resources/
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale (the Ebook version is FREE)
Black* Transwoman to Black Cis/Transman: An Open Letter/Poem for Trayvon and the Rest of Us