Dear Enroot Community,
I write to you today as we all anxiously await the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election to express my love and appreciation for the role that each of you play in making the Enroot family so special.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome of this election, I want to reaffirm that Enroot remains more committed than ever to working shoulder to shoulder with our students, to celebrating the essential contributions immigrants make across our country every single day, and to advocating for equity and justice for immigrant families. Whoever our next president is, we all have a more important responsibility than ever before to speak our truth at every opportunity about the vital role immigrants play in our communities and about how grateful we are for all that immigrants add to this country.
Enroot continues to celebrate the historic candidacy of Senator Kamala Harris, who is the daughter of immigrants and the first woman who identifies as Black and South Asian to run as a Vice Presidential candidate for a major party. Her candidacy is itself a major milestone for this country and an inspiration for many millions of individuals, especially those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC) and/or belong to immigrant households.
For many in the Enroot community and across the country, this election is about so much more than policy and politics. It is about who is welcome here, who truly belongs, who is included, and who is ‘othered’. It is about whose humanity is fully validated and valued. It is about whose lives matter, who feels safe, and who can access the resources required to lead a healthy, productive life. Ultimately, it is about our very identity as a country, and whether we remain committed to marching, step by step, closer to the day when we can say we truly live up to our founding ideals, that all people are created equal, and are therefore equally deserving of love, respect, liberty, and opportunity.
It is important to remain aware that each of us will be processing the election in a different way, based on our identities and those of our loved ones. As you care for yourself and other members of our Enroot community, please keep the following in mind:
Many immigrant students and families may be experiencing especially high levels of anxiety and fear related to the election, based on how dramatically the outcome could impact the next few months and years of their lives.
This anxiety is layered upon 4 years of increasingly common incidents of racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, in addition to stress caused by the covid-19 crisis, which has disproportionately impacted BIPoC, including millions of immigrant families.
The prolonged uncertainty of the election outcome and possibility of election related violence may be triggering and re-traumatizing for some immigrant students and families who experienced similar situations prior to moving to the United States.
Given these and other considerations, it is especially important that we all, regardless of our own identity, make extra efforts to extend care and love to immigrant families in our community. This afternoon we will be holding sessions for our students, and then volunteers, to process the election as a community. I hope each of you will find a way to reach out to someone who might need your compassion in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Although I find my faith in our country’s collective sense of humanity shaken over the last 4 years, I’d like to share a quote that I hold tight in times like these. Following the conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., paraphrasing the words of 19th century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Enroot will continue vigorously fighting for educational and racial equity alongside our amazing students and we remain deeply grateful for your partnership in this work.
With love and great appreciation,
Ben Clark