CREATE Lab stands together with our Black team members, our Black partners, Black workers on campus, and the Black members of the larger community.
We unequivocally affirm that Black lives matter. Black Americans continually experience oppression rooted in a system of institutionalized racism impacting everything from air quality to education, small business loans to voting practices. This issue is especially glaring in light of a deep history and contemporary demonstrations of extreme police violence directed disproportionately at Black community members. We condemn the systemic racism against the Black community. We commit to better understanding our lab's role in systemic racism. We commit to better supporting our Black team members, and becoming more effective, anti-racist partners to Black-led organizations.
We see the results of systemic racism pervasively across housing, health, employment, education, power, and voice. Black voices are suppressed and ignored. This must change. We commit to growing Black leadership within CREATE Lab. We continue our commitment to support and affirm the voices of Black communities, complementing community narratives with data visualization. We commit to expanding partnership with our community as peers, for positive social change.
We see Black-led organizations receiving fewer resources for the work they do, being inequitably excluded from opportunities, and obstructed by institutional barriers. We acknowledge that we benefit from these racist systems and practices. We must do more to stand with our Black partners, to dismantle these racist systems, and to direct resources and opportunities to Black led organizations. This includes pressuring our home institution, Carnegie Mellon University, to be a more equitable and engaged partner with our Black communities, our local Black organizations, and with issues of equity in our region in general.
We acknowledge our role in Carnegie Mellon's growth and the growth of associated industries that have not provided commensurate opportunities for Black residents, and instead create economic forces that displace Black residents. We acknowledge the pipeline from technology education to hiring is steeply inequitable. We commit to holding ourselves, and Carnegie Mellon more broadly, accountable for these inequities, and commit to using our positions to right them. We commit to expanding our summer technology and community engagement paid internship program for students from the greater Pittsburgh area as well as actively supporting Black-owned businesses in the Pittsburgh area.
As a university technology and robotics lab, we acknowledge that technology provides tools that wield power and codify discrimination, and that the invention process is never neutral but rather has implicit biases contained within the process itself. We recognize that technology has been used to exacerbate wealth inequities and to reinforce inequitable power structures and that we are responsible for shepherding the use of technology for positive social good. We commit to using technology and robotics as tools to expose inequity in society and actively strive to resolve inequity together with our partners.
We are grateful to our Black members and community partners who called us out on our silence in the fight for racial equity. Their wisdom and labor in the struggle for our collective liberation are invaluable, yet often undervalued. We hope to honor their words and work in this statement, and in our intentional, anti-racist actions going forward.
Black Lives Matter.
