July 2020

STATEMENT ON CURRENT ISSUES:

This is a time of great challenges. How can we help turn these challenges into tremendous opportunities? How can we help overturn centuries of oppression and help to create a more just world?

How can we be the change that we wish to see in the world? How can we move from personal change to promoting systemic change leading to greater justice?

The Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence at James Madison University is committed to promoting justice and nonviolence through education, scholarship, and engagement. We stand in both word and action with those oppressed by anti-black racism and other forms of injustice. Whether serving as advocates, monitors, enforcers, allies, researchers, communicators, and supporters, we all have responsibility to join in the struggle for freedom and justice. We do so from the perspective of nonviolent resistance and action.

The system has been cracking and it is allowing light to pour in, making even more visible the intersection of oppressive forces and locations of injustice—anti-black racism, poverty, health care, education, policing and incarceration, gender inequality, etc.—and other violations of human rights. We can and must act to help transform the system for justice, for everyone’s benefit. We can do so from many different access points.

How can we turn the challenges into tremendous opportunities? We must be accountable for ways in which we promote and ways in which we can transform oppressive systems.

Those of privilege must join with those who are oppressed. We must listen, learn, and act for justice. We must be a catalyst and collaborator for justice. We must be both students and teachers of justice.

We will make mistakes. We will learn. We will do better. We will persist. We will further justice.

We must speak justice to power. Silence is compliance.

The Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence invites opportunities of learning, service, and collaboration for the nonviolent promotion of justice with those at JMU, with the local and regional community, and with the global community.

Terry Beitzel, Director

Board Members:

Alicia Horst, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Smita Mathur, Keith May,
Charlie Martorano, Bisi Velaudhan, Richard Yoder, Ron Yoder