We, the English Department of Highline College, confirm our commitment to our Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) students and to anti-racist curriculum and pedagogy.
We acknowledge that our discipline has a history of complicity with racist practices that, among other things, have condemned BIPOC students at disproportionate rates to “remedial” education and have enforced a white supremacist language ideology.
We acknowledge our ongoing challenges with addressing the racist implications of our curriculum and pedagogy while recognizing the decades of resistance by scholars, writers, and students as evidenced, for example, by the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s statement on “Students’ Right to their Own Language,” first made in 1974.
We here affirm our commitment to centering our BIPOC students and supporting students of color in all of their intersectional identities, including but not limited to DACA students, international students, immigrants, refugees, multilingual students, and LGBTQ students of color.