Black Lives Matter: Our Collective Responsibility

I was part of the drafting team of the following message of support. I consider this to be an important message. I thank MIT South Asian Alumni Association for taking the lead in crafting this thoughtful message.

Dear MIT South Asian Alumni Family:

We hope you are staying healthy and safe wherever you are in these unprecedented times. During a growing coronavirus pandemic here in the US and a large scale economic shutdown which is disproportionately affecting the poor, the murder of George Floyd, preceded by Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and many others has started a national reckoning around race and police brutality in the United States. The movement around Black Lives Matter has also gone international.

The MIT South Asian Alumni Association stands in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters and calls for an end to the system of policing that led to these unjust murders. The life that we enjoy today is directly a result of the civil rights movement. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed Asian immigration into the US after it was banned by the Asian Exclusion Act in 1927. It was the civil rights movement led by Black Americans that is the reason many of us are here in the first place and for that we owe a debt to Black America. The American Dream cannot exist only for a few. The American Dream that we seek is a place where all Americans can live without fear of police violence. We are all in this together and we cannot feel safe until ALL of our friends, loved ones and neighbors feel safe.

We are attaching here a document sent to us by some students that got us thinking as well as a link to the MIT History department website that provides a list of interesting resources and projects on this subject, including the MIT & Slavery Project which explores the impact of slavery on the history of the Institute. While as South Asian immigrants we have experienced racism in the US, we are also sometimes complicit with white privilege. The model minority myth is used as a racial wedge to perpetuate discrimination against the Black community. We need to recognize the anti-Blackness within our culture and take a zero-tolerance stance to racism in our community.

Because we rarely create a space to do our own work- to think about the ways in which we unconsciously perpetuate systemic racism, perhaps we all need to reflect as the young people are requesting us to do in this moment. What is it like where you are? And if you are outside the United States, does this reverberate with you as well? What can we all do in our circles of influence to be better allies to Black Americans? Because data-driven, diverse MIT minds have always worked together to solve hard problems and create a Better World, we feel that this too is no different. Let us know your thoughts and stay tuned for more as we hope to put together a series of conversations around racial inequality in the near future.

Warmly, MIT South Asian Alumni Association Board Members

Ranu Boppana, SB '87, MD;

Bigyan Bista, PhD '16;

Gurumurthy Kalyanaram, PhD '89;

Raji Patel, SM '77';

Reshma Patel, SB '93