On Racial Discrimination and Reparations

Broadview as an organization acknowledges the pernicious effects of both institutional and individual prejudice of many sorts (including on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and gender presentation), both within North America and around the world. We are committed to making efforts to counteract such prejudice, and the numerous forms of injustice this leads to, through our publications. We further recognize that, like other sorts of organizations, book publishing houses based in North America (and many of their employees) have benefitted in often-unacknowledged ways from certain forms of discrimination in particular—most notably, from the legacy of discrimination against North American Indigenous peoples and against Black people of African descent. Our offices and warehouses stand on land that was acquired without due process of law or moral justification from Indigenous inhabitants; the universities that are the primary market for the books we publish were often built by enslaved labor or funded by the wealth accumulated through enslaving people; our white staff members, and the white authors we publish, have been able to take advantage of opportunities that have often historically been denied to Black people and Indigenous people. The list goes on, and the legacy of the enslavement of Africans in North America (and of subsequent forms of systemic oppression) and of the displacement (and subsequent oppression of) the Indigenous inhabitants of the continent has continued to this day. In recognition of these facts, Broadview is committed to the principle of reparations; as a tangible acknowledgement of that principle, we have begun in 2020 to assign 1% of our annual after-tax profits to charities focused on improving educational and other opportunities for disadvantaged Black and Indigenous students (this in addition to our regular annual practice of charitable donations to a variety of worthy causes).

Broadview reaffirms its commitment to welcoming proposals from and publishing works by scholars with backgrounds that are underrepresented in publishing and academia.