ATDS stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement and with the fight for justice and equity in the United States, the American hemisphere, and the world.

We grieve George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Manuel Ellis, and many, many others. We are enraged by their murders at the hands of police officers. 

We are incensed by the racialized inequity of COVID-19 and its disproportionate toll in Black communities, poor communities, and communities of color. 

The U.S. has long profited from a normalized disposability of Black life; profoundly racialized economic inequity; and modernity’s systemic occlusion of its dependence on coloniality. We maintain that structural and systemic inequity connects the fight for Black life with the fight for lives of color, for lives of the global majority, for the lives of poor, trans, indigenous, immigrant, queer, female, and disabled communities in the U.S. and the world.

As an organization dedicated to the study of theatre, drama, and performance in and of the Americas, our mission demands that we face these oppressions and acknowledge our part in them. 

We pledge our resources to educating ourselves; interrogating, naming, and dismantling our privileges; rooting out anti-Blackness in our field and practices; and amplifying Black voices and voices of color in our scholarship, teaching, administration, and theatre-making. We pledge to articulate actionable tasks. This statement cannot and will not substitute for action. 

We recognize that the American Theatre and Drama Society is a majority white organization. We recognize that Black artists and scholars and neighbors have been doing and living this work for generations and are often called upon to educate their white colleagues. We maintain that it is white responsibility to educate themselves and each other. 

Thank you to ATDS officers and board members for helping write this statement. Thank you to The Bushwick Starr, Tufts Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, and the Theater Department of Skidmore College for sharing resources and language with ATDS.