Standing in Solidarity as a Community
The New Jersey Folk Festival has always been an event dedicated to intercultural understanding, but we can do more. As the largest public project of the Department of American Studies at Rutgers New Brunswick, we are also dedicated to enacting the values of critical thinking and justice that the department strives to uphold in its teaching and research. The Department of American Studies has issued a statement acknowledging the particular importance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and reaffirming its vision of teaching and research deeply engaged in the work of racial justice. We want our Festival family to know that this is the foundation of our curricular, programmatic, and logistical work in the festival, and that we commit – with your help – to finding new ways to enact and strengthen these values in our festival work.
The department’s statement reads in part:
In this time of pain and reflection, we as scholars and educators of American Studies pledge to continue to address difficult histories of race and racism in our courses, to center and illuminate the voices of historically marginalized people and communities, and to create spaces of dialogue and discussion for our students.
The Department of American Studies’ full statement
In addition, we have also signed on to a statement authored by the American Folklore Society, with our colleagues working throughout the field of Folklore. This statement can be found here.
Statements are just a beginning, and we welcome our Festival family to hold us accountable for realizing these statements in our everyday work. We recognize that we can do more to support racial justice and commit to examining how our festival may work to dismantle structural racism internal to our own event and in our community at large. We look forward to engaging with our students, artists, vendors, and our community to find new ways to make the festival a space for equity, justice, education, dialogue, and cultural expression that promotes and sustains racial justice now and in the years to come.
Sincerely,
Dr. Carla Cevasco, Executive Director
Dr. Maria Kennedy, Administrative Director