Statement from the Local to Global Justice planning team
Communities across the United States and globally are once again rising up, as state-sanctioned racial violence perpetrated by police roil Black communities that have been pandemic-stricken, exacerbating precarity and, to quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, differentiating "vulnerability to premature death."
Calls for racial justice are again bringing local and global attention to police brutality, mass incarceration, housing inequality and gentrification, poverty, economic, legal and educational disparity, and access to food, transportation, voter rights and health care. These issues have been compounded by the overrepresentation of Black people among the casualties of the current COVID-19 pandemic and by the most recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Dion Johnson and other Black people at the hands of police.
Local to Global Justice acts in solidarity with our communities, and will continue to host events, organize and participate in peaceful protests, and create spaces for and engage in dialogues, focusing on deepening our collective rejection of white supremacy and systemic racism and other forms of oppression. We will continue to focus our annual event on decolonial and anti-racist actions and commit to sustained solidarity as we fight to abolish white supremacy.
We acknowledge and share the collective and individual grief and intergenerational trauma recent events evoke, and call for radical transparency in the political process at all levels, from the local to the global, to explicitly recognize and redress the structural inequities that continue to undermine, divide, and destroy our communities’ abilities to thrive.
We also endorse the statement and resources from the Collective Impact Forum
Local to Global Justice endorses and encourages you to support and participate with:
Bail funds PHX: Black Peoples Justice Fund Phoenix Metro
For updates on actions and events also see:
About the forum & festival
Each year Local to Global Justice presents the Forum and Festival, an annual event that seeks to connect local diversity, sustainability, social justice, and human rights issues to larger global struggles. This event provides an outstanding space for the sharing of experiences and knowledge between scholars and activists working on a wide range of social justice, human rights and sustainability issues. All are welcome!
Passionate about social justice?
We acknowledge that ASU sits on the ancestral homelands of American Indian tribes that have inhabited this land for centuries, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) peoples. We also acknowledge and pay respect to Indigenous elders – past, present, and future – as custodians of this land throughout the generations.
