Statements on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the Black Lives Matter Movement

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Department of Comparative Humanities is committed to contributing, fostering, and pursuing diversity, equity, and inclusion. We stand in solidarity with underrepresented and oppressed racial, sexual, religious, ethnic, and other marginalized communities.

We seek to create an inclusive and supportive scholarly community. We will therefore prioritize the recruitment, hiring, mentoring, and promotion of faculty from racial, sexual, religious, ethnic, and other underrepresented minorities. We will continue and enhance our efforts to support, mentor, and guide all our students to success in their academic and community lives, particularly nonwhite students and students from underrepresented, underprivileged, and disempowered social and ethnic backgrounds.

Our classes will welcome students of all backgrounds and identities to pursue their intellectual, scholarly, and individual interests without fear of racial bias, gender discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, ageism, and other forms of prejudice. We will seek to develop our curriculum and course syllabi in a way that reflects the multiplicity and diversity of our students’ lives and interests. We will continue to devote ourselves to reviewing and improving our curriculum and our policies to support our students from underrepresented and oppressed communities and to make the Department of Comparative Humanities and the University of Louisville a welcoming home to all students, staff, and faculty.

Our Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement

We support the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight against systemic racism, anti-Black oppression, white supremacy, and police brutality. We will seek to increase the number of African American, Indigenous, and immigrant faculty, staff, and students in our department and at the university.

We pledge to support and protect our Black students and to do all we can to make our department an inclusive and welcoming home for persons of color. We aspire to offer a variety of courses that reflect the significant contributions of African American scholars. We will confront and address instances of existing racism, sexism, or other forms of bias in humanities texts and in the histories and cultures we teach and study.

White supremacy and anti-Black views have no room in our classrooms, meetings, conferences, and scholarly work. We will challenge any expressions of racial bias, prejudice, or discrimination in any form. We will not hesitate to intervene in moments of overt and implicit racism, hate speech, and offensive language or actions.