Oscar Grant. Sandra Bland. Tanisha Anderson. Bettie Jones. Eric Garner. Yvette Smith. Michael Brown. Mario Woods. Freddy Gray. Tamir Rice. Yuvette Henderson.
We say their names, the names of just a few of the hundreds of unarmed Black people who have died within recent memory at the hands of U.S. police.
May they rest now in the peace they were denied when they walked amongst the living.
In our anger and grief at this ongoing injustice, we stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives in their struggle to bring justice to Black communities both in the United States and abroad.
We acknowledge that continuing violence against Black citizens through environmental racism, daily institutional and interpersonal racism, mass incarceration and increasing police brutality constitutes moral reprehensibility in the first degree.
We see the evil twins of white supremacy and structural racism also play out on the world stage, in the fight for climate justice.
We must end white supremacy and structural racism, even while we reduce our energy consumption, shift to renewable energy sources and mitigate the already occurring domestic and global impacts of catastrophic climate change.
A society that robs people of color and indigenous communities of their health, wellbeing, equal opportunity and personal security, even as it poisons the humanity of those who benefit from white skin privilege, is clearly immoral and unsustainable. Ensuring human survival on a livable planet must go hand in hand with realizing equity and justice for all peoples.