The last year has been hard. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed in the United States racialized violence, including the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Anti-Asian violence has increased, fueled by the hateful lie that Asians are responsible for the pandemic.
In addition to a community meeting being held this month on anti-Asian violence, George Mason, Korea along with our sister school on the Incheon Global Campus, the University of Utah, Asia Campus, are hosting a week-long event, "Art for Change," in which students will create and display artworks of all kinds around the theme of social justice.
This month’s Messenger also features a video from Professor Arthur Romano, who talks about the Black Lives Matter protests and the effects of the pandemic on that movement and on anti-Asian racism. These are topics he covers in his recently published essay, “The Pandemic and the Struggle for Racial and Ethnic Justice in America.” Romano, a professor in George Mason’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, further explores in that essay how practitioners of conflict resolution can connect policymakers and academics to citizens and community activists, so that the fight against racism is not limited to top-down efforts.
Romano, who has been teaching for the last year and a half at Mason Korea, is one of the many members of the Mason community working to create, in the words of George Mason’s mission statement, “a more just, free, and prosperous world.” One of the most diverse of universities in the United States, Mason has long been a leader in inclusivity and access in higher education. George Mason University has this year recommitted itself to racial justice and inclusion through the founding of its task force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence.
This task force will explore efforts regarding anti-racism and inclusion across all facets of our university, including the hiring of faculty and staff, the development of new curricula, and the examination of policies and practices. It will look for continuing structures of racial bias at Mason and seek to eradicate them, to build systems to keep such structures from returning, and strive to make Mason “a local, regional, and national beacon to advance anti-racism, reconciliation, and healing.”
What is Mason Korea’s role in this effort? That is a question we will seek to answer as we develop Mason Korea’s own Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Plan this year. But I can already say that we are proud that the establishment of Mason Korea itself was a result of George Mason University’s deep commitment to multiculturalism.
In addition to majors in Conflict Analysis and Resolution and in Global Affairs explicitly focused on multicultural understanding, Mason Korea as a whole seeks to bring diverse peoples together into a community that learns from and with one another.
We see that commitment in another article and event featured in this month's newsletter about Mason Korea Professor of Global Affairs, Soyoung Kwon. Kwon has recently been appointed as a member of Incheon City’s Peace City Initiative Committee. This May she is organizing, along with the Center for Security Policy Studies—Korea, which Professor Kwon directs, a symposium on North Korean defectors and their children.
George Mason University President Gregory Washington has remarked that efforts to create a more diverse community at Mason today are crucial to prepare our students for the increasingly diverse world they will enter and lead. We share this vision at Mason Korea.