Commitment to Marginalized Communities

We stand with our professional societies, including the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, and with Oxy's Black Studies program in condemning police violence against Black People. We affirm that Black Lives Matter.

As scholars and teachers, 我们努力教导学生宗教是如何参与压迫的, as well as ways religion has been a resource for liberation.

宗教学者已经证明，宗教被用来证明对因种族而被边缘化的人的非人化和暴力行为是正当的，这一历史源远流长，方式多种多样, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, ability, and religiosity. 该领域的学者还表明，宗教在产生差异和自卑的分类方案中是不可或缺的. For example:

• Christianity has been used to assert racial and ethnic difference, as well as to sanctify slavery and white supremacy, especially in the United States. 宗教传统所建构的性别和性规范剥夺了folx充分的人类尊严, have limited their opportunities to live a good life, and have incited vitriol, violence, and death.
• Religious privilege and supremacy have justified bigotry and brutality, as well as state-sponsored aggression, against other religious communities (e.g, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia).
• Religions have interpreted individuals' access to economic security, housing, health, education, and social mobility as a function of god's favor and blessing, with the socially-disenfranchised, poor, sick, 受损的人被视为不受上帝的欢迎或惩罚，而富裕的人则被视为上帝仁慈的受惠者.

At the same time, 大量的学术研究——其中大部分是有色人种学者和来自边缘群体的学者——展示了宗教是如何成为边缘群体力量和抵抗的源泉.

• Religious people—such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Sister Antona Ebo, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Sister Helen Prejean, James Cone, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Vine Deloria Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rev. Dr. William Barber II—have led movements, crafted theologies, and mobilized religious symbolism to battle racial, economic, and environmental injustice.
• 嵌入宗教传统的故事奠定了宗教身份，并作为指导未来解放计划的试金石. For example, 希伯来圣经中关于埃及从奴役中解放出来的叙述一直是犹太社区力量和抵抗的源泉, 以及其他受压迫的群体，比如美国内战前的非裔美国人和牙买加的拉斯塔法里教徒.
• 面对压迫，宗教团体和集会一直是复兴和力量的源泉. For example, 受非洲启发的宗教，如Regla de Ocha (Santería)和candomblaise，帮助非洲奴隶和他们的后代在经历了中部航道的创伤后建立了社区和身份认同, 佛教和基督教对二战期间被关押在集中营的日裔美国人来说也是如此. 此外，社区行动和社会运动通常起源于宗教社区.

十大正规网赌平台的宗教研究部门认真对待宗教之间的复杂关系, oppression, and liberation. Many of our courses center these themes and frames of analysis. Yet we also understand ourselves—our academic discipline, institutions of higher education, 而我们，作为教育者和普通人，在权力体系和随之而来的特权体系中根深蒂固.

In Fall 2019, 我们制定了一项20点行动计划，在我们寻求面对不平等和促进正义的过程中指导我们的教师和课程. Our plan consists of class-level and department-level practices. Some of our class-level practices include:

• Offering courses that focus explicit attention on power, race/ethnicity, socio-economic inequalities, gender, sexual identity, sexual assault, colonialism, and other structures of oppression and marginalization;
• Assigning materials that represent a range of perspectives, 包括来自历史边缘化群体的人们的观点，他们的声音很少被听到.g., racial/ethnic minorities, low-income, groups regarded as heretics or religious outsiders, women and gender non-binary, sexual minorities, people with impairments); and especially assigning scholarship from authors who belong to underrepresented communities;
• Transparency with students regarding the history of our discipline, especially in terms of its complicity with colonialism, bias toward Judeo-Christian traditions, the intellectual deficiencies caused by an underrepresentation of non-white scholars, and the barriers and challenges faced by scholars from underrepresented communities); and
• 为学生提供反馈的机会，让他们了解我们课程的哪些方面最有利于他们的学习和发展, as well as what aspects of our courses are introducing barriers to their learning; responding to their feedback; and, more broadly, treating students as whole people whose lives are sometimes complicated and difficult.

Our plan also consists of departmental-level practices such as:

• Recognizing our own positionality, 我们将定期审查我们个人从现有权力结构和排除少数族裔学者的现状中获益的方式, students, and community members; being willing to give up our privilege when it disadvantages others or when it takes up space that could empower others; being committed to challenging college policies and protocols that unevenly advantage white, straight, male people (and others with privilege); and leveraging our privilege to amplify the voices of those who are regularly silenced or ignored;
• Understanding ourselves to be responsible to keep ourselves current by reading scholarship on challenges faced by underrepresented students and best practices their facilitate their personal flourishing and academic success; holding ourselves accountable to this responsibility by designating a schedule for discussing these readings as a departmental faculty, 关注学生评价中关于未被充分代表的学生在我们课堂上的经历的评论, and, in our individual annual reports, strategizing how we must correct and develop our pedagogy in light of this feedback;
• 为来自历史上代表性不足的社区的学生提供高影响力研究机会(如URC暑期项目), 指导学生在专业会议上展示他们的研究成果, 并帮助申请研究生院……所有这些都是为了干预学术渠道，扩大我们领域学者的多样性;
• Soliciting input from the Chief Diversity Officer, current students and alum, and student organizations regarding how the Department might better facilitate students' personal flourishing and the academic success of minoritized students; and
• 在每年的部门自我评估中，评估部门推行这些措施的进度.