CLIR strongly condemns the murder of George Floyd, as well as Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and all Black people who have lost their lives to violence and police brutality motivated by hatred and prejudice. We state unequivocally that the Black lives of our staff, our community, and our nation matter.
As an organization that strives to keep social and racial justice at the center of its work, we are working now on a response with action, not just words, to address the systemic and institutionalized racism that continues to cause trauma in our field and everywhere in this country. As a start, CLIR is extending its flexible leave policy originally put into place for the pandemic to support staff who need to be with family or take care of themselves. CLIR is also initiating staff training to better understand inherent bias and anti-racist approaches, with the aim of undertaking our programmatic work with these greater competencies. This training will be ongoing, recognizing that such reflection should never stop. At the same time, we will examine how we promote racial equity in our current activities, while also seeking to develop new programs that explicitly focus on amplifying voices that have been ignored for far too long.
Through CLIR and DLF, we feel fortunate to be working within a community for whom integrity, truth, transparency, and social and racial justice are seen to be central values. We will strive to earn and retain your trust, listen, and do better.
Within the next week, we will issue a more detailed response from CLIR President Charles Henry. For now, we’ve listed below resources you may find helpful.
We wish you all safety and strength during this challenging time.
Resources
- #COVIDwhileBlackPA: A Digital Roundtable
- Building and Using Collections as Data: Using Machine Learning to Identify Jim Crow Laws, Kimber Thomas (CLIR Postdoc), Amanda Henley, Lorin Bruckner, CNI Spring 2020
- Imagining Better Futures for Archival Labor, Dorothy Berry keynote, Society of North Carolina Archivists
- Activists’ Guide to Archiving and Archive! from Witness
- An Essential Reading Guide for Fighting Racism
- The work of Documenting the Now
- National Museum of African American History & Culture Being Antiracist.
- Antiracism in America: a collaboration between The Guardian and American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center.
For Anti-racist training:
- Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training http://crossroadsantiracism.org/
- Racial Equity Institute https://www.racialequityinstitute.com/
- Rachel Cargle https://www.rachelcargle.com/
- Sofia Leung https://www.sofiayleung.com/
