Introduction

This “Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias” responds to the shock of the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, coming on the heels of that of Breonna Taylor on March 13 in Louisville, and to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the country and the world in the months that followed. How can we, in our roles as scholars and teachers, respond meaningfully to the urgent call for racial justice for Black Americans? Specifically, how can we do this from our positions in the Slavic field, which, as a contributor to this forum writes, is “an overwhelmingly white field” focused on “a region with tangential relevance to the Black experience”?1 As another contribution points out, when AATSEEL made its “Statement Concerning Systemic Racism and Police Brutality in the United States” in 2020, it acknowledged this seeming tangential relevance with the prefacing remark, “AATSEEL does not generally make statements about public issues unless they directly relate to the Slavic Field.”2 This forum aims to demonstrate that the call for racial justice does in fact relate directly to the field. Given this, it questions: how has it, and how should it, transform our teaching, scholarship and institutional practices? How are many of us, and the academic institutions we populate, part of the problem? How can we be part of the solution?