Society of Sinophone Studies Anti-Racism Solidarity Statement

Society of Sinophone Studies Anti-Racism Solidarity Statement

Black Lives Matter.

The year 2020 witnesses a groundswell of various anti-racist sentiments across the globe. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to numerous anti-Asian racist attacks in North America, Europe, the South Pacific, and South Asia, etc. While we condemn these anti-Asian hate crimes, we recognize that such xenophobic violence is tied to imperial and colonial structures that also manifest in anti-Indigeneity, racialized classism, and antiblackness around the world. Victims of pandemic-induced racism also include migrant communities such as Africans in China and migrant workers in Singapore. While Africans in Guangzhou are evicted from their homes and barred from restaurants, the containment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang raise concerns of viral spread, and migrant workers continue to risk being infected by the virus living in crowded dormitories in Singapore.

The most recent murders of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery in the name of law enforcement again highlights the systemic problems of police brutality and most importantly, the unresolved history of anti-black racism in and beyond the United States. These developments lay bare the fact that we as a global community have repeatedly failed to reckon with our histories of racialised extraction and exploitation. While thousands of protesters took to the street to demand racial justice in the US, similar movements have sprung up across the globe.

As board members of the Society of Sinophone Studies, we recognize the fear, injustice and griefs experienced by communities and individuals that have fallen victim to various forms of violence, discrimination and racist acts. We are in solidarity with those who are protesting globally the tyranny of state-sanctioned violence and systemic racism. We join them to condemn the killing of Floyd and others and related policing practices. While transforming structures requires the decolonizing of our collective minds, we are committed to studying global slavery, race-making, minority rights movements, and their relationship to present day social justice mobilizations.

In these trying times, we want to offer the Society of Sinophone Studies as a platform to provide support for our members and friends by sharing resources to educate us on issues related to anti-racism, political and ethnic violence, Black liberation, intersectional inequality, social justice and civic activism, etc. We believe in the importance of locating collective voices to establish a network of solidarity in order to work toward the eradication of systemic oppression and to fight for justice and equality for marginalized and underrepresented communities. Please find a list of resources on our website at https://www.sinophonestudies.org/antiracism-solidarity-statement. We will continue to update the resources. If you would like to contribute to this list, please email us at admin@sinophonestudies.org

Board Members

Society of Sinophone Studies