In the wake of the slaying of George Floyd, and of so many African Americans before him, the department of English at Washington University in St. Louis maintains that Black books and Black Lives Matter. Current circumstance also compels us to recognize the involvement of all institutions in the structures of injustice in this country. And while we recognize that we are embedded in this social history, we also need to affirm that we are not prisoners of the past. We may take this moment in history as memory and record of a will to change, and to change in ways that take us past the systems of inequity existing still in our midst. With the moral clarity current circumstance affords, we must demand better from our institutions even as we ask more of ourselves.
