BLACK EMERGENCY MANAGERS ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL: 2017. Valuing Black Lives Global Summit Communiqué and Call to Action

“……..The anti-Black narrative is grounded in the lie that everything Black is inferior—Black skin, Black hair, Black culture, and Black values. For more than 500 years, nearly every institution of Western society has—explicitly and/or implicitly—carried the message that everything that comes out of Africa is inferior, including its people.

The anti-Black narrative is the reason why, according to the United Nations (2015), the descendants of the victims of enslavement, people of African ancestry all over the world, are today among the “poorest and most marginalized groups,” who “have limited access to quality education, health services, housing and social security, ... and all too often experience discrimination in their access to justice, and face alarmingly high rates of police violence, together with racial profiling.”..... "

Dear Sisters and Brothers:

Happy New Year. We hope this note finds you well.

We are delighted to announce the release of the Valuing Black Lives Global Summit Communiqué and Call to Action, available for download here.

This is a call to the African Diaspora to change our narrative in order to change our trajectory.

Thank you for joining Valuing Black Lives 2016 and contributing to the global exchange of ideas about how we free ourselves from the root causes of the devaluing of Black lives.

The 2017 Global Action Task Force has been hard at work planning for a May 2017 launch of the Action: #ImAfricanBornIn____ #WeAreOne, and will be releasing its plan next month.

Please share the Communiqué and Call to Action widely, and please join in, and help us spread the word about, the 2017 Global Action.

Thank you.

We look forward to our continuing collaboration with you in this third year of the International Decade for People of African Descent.

Sincerely,

Enola Aird, Community Healing Network, Inc.

Cheryl Tawede Grills,

The Association of Black Psychologists