A Time to Listen, Reflect, Act, and Represent
Today, our demands for racial justice and human dignity are spurred by the tragic killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and many others. We are witnessing demonstrations and protests against violent forms of systemic racism, throughout the US and worldwide. In this struggle for justice, SIGCHI stands with Black communities, under-represented minorities, and their allies. Black lives matter. Today and every day.
Even as this flashpoint in the struggle for racial justice unfolds primarily in the US, ours is a global community. Some struggles are more visible in certain geographies over others, owing to histories of oppression, but we fully recognize that members of our community worldwide are faced with a long list of systemic injustices. The task that lies before us is one of weaving equity, inclusion, and solidarity into each of our scholarly and professional activities, so that “diversity and inclusion” are not add-ons, but deeply integrated into our every practice, whether it involves conference processes, volunteering responsibilities, or global community support mechanisms.
Within SIGCHI, we care deeply about addressing discrimination of all kinds. We are committed to bringing down barriers to equal participation — in our community and the many worlds in which we work, but we must do better. It is not enough to not be racist; we must be anti-racist. With this in mind the SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) is committing to taking the following steps to confront racism and other forms of discrimination and structural inequity.
- Listen and Reflect: We will identify avenues for our community members to share their experiences, observations, and suggestions around representation and existing practices, so that we can all listen actively, reflect, and learn. We will work together with those whose ability to participate is impacted, to identify ways of amplifying these voices. We will organize dialogues with our members so we all may strengthen our approaches to identifying and addressing prevalent forms of discrimination, racial and otherwise.
- Act Locally: Relying on lessons learned through active listening, we will communicate practices for our community to engage and adopt in personal and professional arenas, including in SIGCHI conferences, events, and publications.
- Represent: We will conduct a systematic review of formal SIGCHI policies and regular practices to examine how best we can respond to bias and bring down barriers that obstruct equal participation for any number of reasons. Specifically, we will take a deeper look at our conferences, volunteering, and community support offerings, to assess how our community may be better represented.
Based on our active listening, the SIGCHI EC will identify recommendations by the end of September, report these to the SIGCHI community in writing, and discuss them in a (virtual) town hall before the end of 2020. We will then begin the work towards integrating these short- and long-term recommendations into SIGCHI policies and practices. Throughout this process, we will be transparent and accountable across the SIGCHI community as we work to achieve our long-term commitments.
We are grateful for the initiative that many in our community have taken in these difficult times, to raise voices against deep injustice and extend support to others affected. Still, we urge our membership — those who are able — to reflect individually and together on the ways in which systemic racism and other systems of domination manifest to threaten the principles of equity and inclusion we espouse as a community. Whether it is in our research activities, our industry jobs, or our classrooms, how might we take on the responsibility of initiating the hard conversations? And of creating the safe spaces in which these conversations may have impact? Our search for justice inevitably ties us together as humans; now is the moment for each one of us to ask — how can we move forward together, in solidarity, to effect deep, systemic change?
The SIGCHI Executive Committee
(SIGCHI-EC@listserv.acm.org)
Image: Max Bender @maxwbender https://unsplash.com/photos/yPvnaBzyZu8
