BC Studies in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter

BC Studies expresses our solidarity with Black Lives Matter and anti-racist protesters around the world who have risen to condemn the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. The anti-Black racism that caused their premature deaths is a manifestation of the pervasive structural racism arising from the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Their deaths occurred as incidents of anti-Asian violence are on the rise during the COVID-19 epidemic. Their deaths occurred as Black and Indigenous people in Canada—Chantal Moore, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Jason Collins, Eishia Husdon, D’Andre Campbell—continue to lose their lives to the hands of police. We unreservedly deplore these breaches of human rights.  We stand together with all who exercise their right to express outrage and demand change through peaceful protest. And we stand, with compassion, in support of the grieving families.

At BC Studies we see colonialism and racism at the centre of our understanding of this place called British Columbia. Our journal is produced on the unceded ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people, and we recognize the responsibility that this hospitality in turn requires of us.  We endorse the anti-racism statements issued at UBC by President Santa Ono and the Faculty Association. We are committed to playing a role in the dismantling of structural racism and on-going colonialism within the university.  We are committed to the dissemination of anti-racist research and to the decolonization of scholarly and public knowledges. BC Studies regularly publishes scholarship that addresses racism and colonialism and that results from community-based, participatory, or other decolonial methodologies.

We recognize that we must do more. We must do more in our journal and through our website to expose the racialized nature of this province from its structures of power down to individual experiences. We must do more to be an attractive publication venue for scholars of colour and Indigenous scholars. And we must do more to disseminate anti-racist perspectives in ways that are accessible to broader publics.

Implementing meaningful action along these fronts will take time. But we have already taken some immediate steps. We have issued a call for submissions that attend in particular to race and racism in BC. We have initiated discussion among editors and editorial board members about future public outreach. And, we have begun to re-index our extensive bibliography of fifty years of scholarship on British Columbia to highlight published research on race and racism.

At BC Studies we commit ourselves to a program of continuing education—unlearning, learning, and relearning—on the complex issues of racism in all its forms. And we encourage our readers and supporters to join us in doing likewise.