Our Statement on Racial Injustice

June 2020

We are living in a historic moment. Like you, we are watching our country come to terms with its history and its present in the wake of police brutality that is the continuation of centuries of anti-Black violence in the United States. We are also living through the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted BIPOC communities. How each of us is processing this depends on our own lived experiences, our individual confrontations with racism, and/or the mirrors we have been forced to hold up to ourselves and our communities. Through all of this, we are reflecting, we are learning, and we are taking action. We share our statement on racial injustice with you: 

At Tufts, we take pride in a community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni dedicated to confronting injustices. As our nation grapples with the recent killings of Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, we recognize that anti-Black violence has persisted in our nation for centuries. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis is only one of the most recent instances of police brutality perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy. We, the staff of the Tufts Office of Undergraduate Admissions, stand in solidarity with Black students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as Black prospective students, in condemning racial injustice. Black Lives Matter.

Tufts Admissions supports high school and college students across the country and around the world speaking out against racism and violence against Black people, and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Prospective students’ participation in protests will not adversely impact them in our admissions process.

Our solidarity must be backed with action. We recognize that many people at Tufts have been vigorously engaged in anti-racism work for years. We also recognize that as higher education professionals at a predominantly white institution, we are part of a system that perpetuates racial inequality—a system in which there is much more anti-racism work to do. We commit to our office’s anti-racism work in the following ways: 

1. Educating ourselves about white supremacy, racism, and anti-Blackness.
2. Recognizing, interrogating, and disrupting the structural and individual racism that impacts educational opportunities for students of color.
3. Identifying ways in which racism manifests in our admissions process, from recruitment to application review to enrollment, and developing anti-racist practices for confronting it.  
4. Continuing to support Black and Indigenous students, and all students of color, through the application process and working to be an educational resource for them on their paths to college, whether or not they decide Tufts is the place for them.
5. Recommitting to recruiting diverse candidate pools for staff positions in our office, to training all staff on mechanisms of bias in hiring processes, and to developing and retaining a staff that better reflects the diversity of our nation and our world.

We understand that anti-racism work is never done. We must commit ourselves to this work today, tomorrow, and every day after that in our efforts to dismantle systemic racism in all its forms. 

We also must be held accountable. We are committing now to communicating our progress via our website in the months and years to come, to sharing the concrete steps we are taking to confront racial injustice and practice anti-racism, and to sharing how our work is changed as a result.

To all of you, we extend these commitments, and our hope to be a support for you in an application process that is not separate from the world that surrounds it. 

In solidarity, 

The staff of the Tufts Office of Undergraduate Admissions