PLEASE SIGN: Ask American Physical Society for a #BlackLivesMatter Statement
Letter initiated by white queer/genderqueer scientists who are mostly women
I was asked by the writers of this letter to help publicize it. They hope you will join them in signing the letter and sending a message to the American Physical Society.
In response to racist police practices and ongoing police violence against Black folks in the United States, a group of physicists have come together to petition the American Physical Society (APS) to release a statement in support of Black lives and to acknowledge the impact on Black physicists by these issues. You can read and sign the petition here:
Letter to APS: http://bit.ly/2dgr3WL
As APS members, we recognize that racist police practices ranging from profiling to violence represent psychological and physical harm to physicists from communities of color, and particularly Black physicists. Furthermore, we recognize that such practices could very well impact Black physicists, for example, when traveling to an APS meeting. Given the particular context of numerous recent high-profile police killings of Black people, we consider with fear the possibility that this violence may impact our Black students, colleagues, or supervisors.
With these concerns in mind, we call on all physicists to co-sign our letter to APS requesting immediate engagement with the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. People who are APS members are especially encouraged to sign, though signatures from allies who are not members of APS are also welcome.
We further wish to acknowledge that this letter was written by a group of white queer and/or genderqueer physicists, most of whom are women, in solidarity with Black physicists and others who experience racial oppression in the physics community. We ask that you read and sign the petition today.
Read and sign the letter to APS here
View the letter here
Sincerely,
Nicole Ackerman (Assistant Professor, Agnes Scott College)
Dimitri Dounas-Frazer (Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Colorado Boulder)
Michael L. Falk (Professor, Johns Hopkins University)
Savannah Garmon (Assistant Professor, Osaka Prefecture University)
Renée Hložek (Assistant Professor, Dunlap Institute and Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto)
Elena Long (Post Doctoral Research Associate, University of New Hampshire)
MacKenzie Warren (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Michigan State University)
