Anti-Racism Work and the German Department

We, the faculty of Bowdoin’s German department, share the grief and outrage over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black lives.

We condemn the lasting effects of white supremacy and of structural racism, especially anti-Black racism, in our country and across the globe.

The work and struggle against racism is as much community work as it is individual work. We are committed to action. We hear and see the concerns of our students, and we support and join their call for action. We promise to teach our students how to scrupulously and critically engage with texts, cultural objects, and practices that have for too long served as instruments of exclusion and marginalization.

We continue to work towards an ever more inclusive curriculum in German Studies and towards co-curricular events and activities that challenge and shift the traditional focus of our academic field and that take seriously global and cross-cultural perspectives.

We pledge to examine our current and forthcoming courses to address questions of racism, sexism, and other forms of marginalization inherent to our discipline. We promise to better foreground the voices of women, artists of color, non-native authors, and all others neglected and silenced by the traditional canon.

We assure to undertake this work individually in research and teaching and jointly as a department with our current and future students.