“How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1957
The Ordeal of Mansart
The Department of Sociology at Dickinson College issues this statement in support of protests demanding anti-racist reforms to end police violence.
Black lives matter.
Our department was founded to develop knowledge about society, and to teach students to learn and apply sociological knowledge in their own lives as citizen leaders. As such, we remain, as individuals and as a department, committed to anti-racism. The discipline of sociology has presented a vast amount of evidence that institutional racism produces outcomes including police violence, hate crimes and other bias incidents, racist segregation, disparate life expectancies and other racist patterns in public health, and dangerous and unjust levels of racist economic inequality, and more.
Therefore, the undersigned faculty and staff of the Dickinson College Sociology Department urge all members of our program and the broader Dickinson community—students, alumni, faculty, staff—and anyone reading this message to support anti-racist efforts here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and beyond.
Furthermore, we endorse the efforts made by Dickinson College Sociology alumna, Sierra Climaco, ’20, and the Dickinson College Women of Color Summit, to gather resources and practical guidance for all who wish to support efforts to enact meaningful anti-racist reforms, as published here: tinyurl.com/dsonwoc2020-06/.
Signed June 3, 2020, by
Vickie Kuhn, Former Senior Academic Department Coordinator, Helene Lee, Associate Professor; Erik Love, Associate Professor and Department Chair;
Maria Ritchie, Academic Department Coordinator and Member, President’s Commission on Inclusivity; Susan Rose, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology;
Dan Schubert, Associate Professor; Amy Steinbugler, Associate Professor