Tony McDade should still be alive

Breonna Taylor should still be alive

George Floyd should still be alive

Ahmaud Arbery should still be alive

Nina Pop should still be alive

Jamel Floyd should still be alive

All the Black people who have died from Covid-19 should still be alive

They were all killed by state-sanctioned violence carried out by racist police and the racist systems that prop up our healthcare, education, economic, social, and cultural infrastructure.

We affirm the value of ALL Black people’s lives and we commit to doing memory work both in our personal and professional lives that will lead to dismantling systems that continue to harm Black people.

We are Black memory workers committed to documenting the Black experience during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the current uprisings brought about by racist police violence against Black people.

We offer this call to action because we know moments of crisis and Black suffering are also opportunities ripe for institutional exploitation and professional opportunism in the cultural memory sector, where harmful activities involved with building collections for institutions that don’t care about Black people, become more important than documenting the root causes of why Black people are suffering in the first place.

We commit to doing ethical memory work that protects Black people because racist state-sanction violence also resists documentation.