The Scala Center team
Black Lives Matter.
Systemic racial discrimination and state-supported brutality is unacceptable.
The Scala Center team (further: we) recognizes that all global social justice movements that contributed to a more civilized world have started somewhere, and today we would like to applaud our American brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings for taking the courage, and persisting in saying “enough is enough!”.
We believe that standing in solidarity with this movement requires us to do the work necessary to further its aims of justice and equity within the community we support and are responsible for.
We encourage each of our Scala colleagues to do more than just declare that they are not racist. If anything, this moment demonstrates that we have been complacent for too long and it is time to be actively anti-racist. Anti-racism isn’t a soundbite or a hashtag– it requires work: both internally with deep self-reflection on our own biases; and externally with people we know and love, which might be uncomfortable.
We stand before you committed to manifesting the transformative change we hope to see in the Scala community as a whole. To quote Code2040.org “this is not a sprint, it is not a marathon, it is a relay race”, and we believe it is our turn to take the baton.
More concretely, to honor our commitment, within the next 6 months, our team will take these actions:
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We are currently going through the process of an Advisory Board Proposal focused on diversity and inclusion, which could shape and direct our future actions when accepted by the board. Please stay tuned as we go through this process, we are aiming to institute structural change in our community and invest resources behind the initiatives we decide to go with.
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We will come up with a proposal for how you can become an ally. We need time to better orient ourselves, read, learn and listen before we can confidently invite you to participate.
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We will update the scala-lang community page to better reflect (more clearly communicate) community values & initiatives. In the meantime, we invite everyone who is willing to help us highlight all the awesome work the community is doing.
And in the long run we will continue:
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to produce accessible, free, and high quality Scala education material,
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to deepen our support & empowerment initiatives of diversity and inclusion throughout our activities (events we create and are a part of, forums we moderate, processes we lead, conversations we engage in),
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to work towards increasing the representation of underrepresented minorities in the Scala Center team,
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to engage in active dialogue and self-critique, including but not limited to how we can keep bettering the Scala community.
Thank you for reading, we encourage you to continue learning, listening and striving for equality.
If you are interested in the Scala Center more in detail & want to learn how to support its work, check out this 30min ScalaLove presentation from April 2020 by Darja Jovanovic and Julien Richard-Foy.