The department’s Social Justice and Equity Committee has issued the statement below in response to the recent killings in Atlanta.
March 19, 2021
Dear members of the Music Department community,
In light of Wednesday’s murder of eight people in Georgia, six of them Asian or Asian-American, the Social Justice and Equity Committee wishes to say loudly and publicly that we condemn all forms and degrees of violence, threat, harassment, mistreatment, and bias against Asian and Asian-American students, staff, faculty, or visitors in our department. We are committed to protecting our Asian and Asian-American colleagues’ safety, integrity, and ability to work both on- and off-campus.
We stand in solidarity with Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities in their grief, anger, and fear. There is no excuse—most certainly not one of “having a bad day”—that can justify this racist hate crime or its diminishment as such by law enforcement. We must call this mass murder what it is: a scourge of white supremacy and misogyny, exacerbated by our nation’s lack of gun safety laws to keep firearms out of the hands of those who seek to do harm.
Yet we also acknowledge that anti-Asian racism is not merely a problem elsewhere. We know that our own world in music is not immune to anti-Asian sentiment: we recognize a long history of Orientalism in ethnomusicology; deeply offensive depictions of Asian, and particularly Asian female, characters in Western opera; the underrepresentation of AAPI composers in curricula and concert programming; and harmful stereotypes of Asian performers of Western classical music. And while there are differences in both degree and kind separating these manifestations of anti-Asian racism from the all too familiar history of violence against women of color in this country, we also understand that it is the cumulative and dehumanizing effect of racist aggressions, both slight and egregious, that ultimately fuels outbreaks of physical violence.
As an immediate step, and in service of fortifying our community and offering support, we invite all Music Department faculty to hold ad hoc office hours today, Friday, March 19 and Monday, March 22, to offer space to students who have questions or want to talk at this time. We ask that faculty contact students in their courses or with whom they work to let them know when they are available. Additionally, we invite students who wish to speak to members of the Social Justice and Equity Committee to contact us (our names are listed below).
White supremacy and misogyny are toxins that all of us breathe and exhale to varying degrees, and we ask you to join in our commitment to dismantling these ideologies.
Together in community and in concern,
The Social Justice and Equity Committee
Department of Music, SUNY Stony Brook
Faculty members:
Ryan Minor (chair)
Margarethe Adams
Nirmali Fenn
Shoshana Hershkowitz
João-Luis Rezende Lopes
Daria Semegen
August Sheehy
James Austin Smith
Benjamin Tausig
Student members:
Haley Briggles
Laura Davey
Jasmine Goley
Charles Hsueh
Elizabeth Lawrensen
Gui Hwan Lee
Archer Lim
Niloufar Nourbakhsh
Eli Yamin