Letting Go of the Fear of Racism

I’ve won academic awards, traveled abroad, graduated from college and lived in my own apartment. If I had let fear of racism hold me back, I would not have achieved these accomplishments. I refuse to dress and act a certain way to be perceived as “acceptable” or “safe” and I am not going to hold myself back from opportunities out of fear of impending racism.

Indigenous Peoples at the Heart of Climate and Biodiversity Action Offer Hope

For years, Indigenous groups have advocated outside of COP walls — holding press briefings at picnic tables, leading demonstrations, telling stories of their communities and demanding to be heard. Their activism led them from the periphery of global climate events to the very nucleus where negotiations take place.

Imagining Reproductive Health Care Access in a Post-Roe World

A disturbing subtext to the Texas abortion ban, its copycats, and the end of Roe, is that wealthy women will always be able to travel anywhere they need to obtain reproductive health care. Women with low incomes and incarcerated women will not.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson - A Dream Deferred But Not Denied

But we can never lose sight of the need to tackle every element of systemic racism in our country. Judge Jackson’s confirmation is a historic first and must not be the last.

Burness Film Festival: A Journey to Become Better Allies

For far too long, people of color have carried the emotional burden of living and working in spaces that diminish their existence. I’m proud this Film Festival gives us an opportunity to honor and better understand communities of color in all their complexity, challenges and humanity. Our discussions allow us to take an honest look at how some are cocooned in advantages they didn’t earn and others are cloaked in disadvantages they don’t deserve.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Personal Reflections on the Fight Against Antisemitism

It always strikes me how well adherents of antisemitism know their history. The forces that led to the Holocaust—which was so unprecedented that the world had to invent a new word, genocide, in an attempt to somehow capture the scale of the atrocity—are the same ones that sparked anti-Jewish crimes thousands of years ago as well as just a few days ago. The times may change, the circumstances may change, the details may change—but the beliefs that lead to these acts of violence remain the same. If the forces of antisemitism remain willing to learn about the past and act on their beliefs, shouldn’t those of us who oppose them do the same?