06/10/2020
We find our world in a time of heightened struggles for justice, equity, and the preservation of life. In the United States, in particular, this time is marked by the essential presence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the battle to end the long campaign of extrajudicial murder and persecution that has claimed the lives of so many of our fellow citizens, from George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, back into the history of the various imperial colonial invasions that have structured human history in so many terrible ways. Black Lives Matter—and matter, furthermore, only in themselves but also in the inspiration and support they lend to the struggles of other marginalized and oppressed people around the world. We honor both the local context of our struggles for human flourishing and the global context of the worldwide fight to preserve human and non-human life in peace and dignity. The Program in LGBTQ Studies at UCLA comes from a tradition of thought and action that aspires to care for those on the margins, to defend those left unprotected from harm, to cherish those regarded as less-deserving or less-valuable. We stand with those who are seeking justice, and we aim to find more powerful ways to speak in support of the struggle. We are each other’s teachers to and we are grateful for the work in building our collective wisdom and strength.
