While committed to German Studies, we value the study of all languages and cultures. In our scholarship, teaching, and service we strive to express and analyze the lived reality of the German-speaking world as complex, pluralistic, and diverse. We challenge and deconstruct common stereotypes by making visible the voices, stories, perspectives, and values of marginalized and minoritized groups that have been historically excluded from the curriculum. We acknowledge the harms done by settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, and the implications of German-speaking individuals and the various German states and the German nation in those historical processes. We understand that the proliferation and persistence of European languages in the United States is directly related to the erasure of Native languages and communities. We recognize the ways in which colonialist and racist thought and practice persist and affect our communities, society, and institutions. In line with Colorado College’s pledge to become an antiracist institution, we are committed to pedagogical and curricular approaches that take diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracist work as their main principles, and aim to dismantle, decenter, and replace the pervasive manifestations of structural, institutional, and individual racism in our society.