It is an exceedingly popular theme this year – and it’s not surprising. For kids, archaeology is the perfect combination of hands-on, material based exploration combined with a detective story trying to puzzle together a picture of the past from bits of stones, bones, and pottery. It speaks to children’s innate curiosity about the world and their place in it. Add LEGOs to the mix and you clearly have a winning combo.

Turns out it’s not just kids who love archaeology. Documentaries, TV series, and movies on archaeology or archaeological themes are popular. Hardly a week goes by without news of some archaeological discovery making international headlines, like about the giant statues on Rapa Nui or the complex domestication history of cats. Archaeology sells.

People also spend their time and money on exploring archaeology. Archaeotourism – visiting archaeological sites and museums on vacation – is popular. The Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt attracted more than 15 million visitors last year. In the US, many of the most famous archaeological sites are in or around national parks, such as Mesa Verde National Park, that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors a year despite their more remote locations.

Why does archaeology resonate with so many of us? Perhaps partly because it taps into our inner child – our joy of discovery. But it also provides us with a unique perspective on the world and ourselves. Archaeology amplifies the voices and lives of normal people – not just the victors or rulers. Through the fragmented items people left behind, archaeologists reconstruct real people’s lives. We uncover the food they ate; the houses they built, the art they created; the toys, games, and instruments they played. We see how they cared for their sick and injured; honored their ancestors; prayed to their gods; and laid their loved ones to rest. We recreate their worlds, politics, economies, and rituals from the traces they left us. And with all of this, we see other ways of living; other ways of interacting; and other ways of organizing societies that often feel very strange and distant from our own today.

Despite this distance, they teach us that although their lives are finite, they can still be felt today, even if only through a piece of pottery with a fingerprint, or a portrait of a person from 30,000 years ago carved into mammoth ivory. Ideas that changed the world like the wheel; ancient cities that emerged and eventually abandoned; political institutions that rose and fell; all of these show us that humans are always changing and adapting. Archaeology provides us with so many examples of different ways of living, surviving, and thriving, as well as responses to challenges of political instability, climate change, and warfare.

Many news stories today challenge our humanity – they show us the worst of us, our politicians, our worlds. Archaeology speaks to the breadths and depths of our humanity, our understanding of interconnectedness of the people and the earth we inhabit. We can marvel at the ingenuity and courage of colonizing the Pacific, navigating areas of open sea the size of north America with low tech but complex knowledge of seafaring and astronomy; and we cringe at the brutality of a mass grave from 6200 years ago, where an entire village of women, men, and children were murdered. We bend our brains to imagine worlds very different from our own – while knowing that they are not figments of imagination but that they once existed, as we do now. Sometimes it reminds us to be grateful for living in our current time and place.

This cultural heritage is worth protecting, studying, and supporting. Funding cuts to the National Science Foundation, National Park Service, and other federal agencies have already curtailed archaeological research worldwide and eliminated hundreds of archaeology jobs, leaving U.S. heritage unprotected. Without this stewardship, cultural heritage in the US is at grave risk; so too is our ability to conduct research elsewhere and train new generations of archaeologists.

Archaeology may never cure cancer – although it does provide insight into the evolution of many diseases and the human body that help other researchers understand these pathogens better. It may also not develop new technologies – although it can play a role in creating more humane and ethical AI technologies. It enriches our understanding of the planet, our species, and ourselves, and challenges us to address current environmental issues in novel (or ancient) ways. While funding has always only been a tiny drop in the overall research funding bucket (0.06% of NSF’s overall budget in 2023), private foundations can’t make up the difference – we need to fight to reinstate funding to our federal grant agencies, research institutions, and universities.

Archaeology reminds us that fragile lives can leave enduring legacies. It demands humility, highlights our humanity, and inspires all of us – not just this year’s First League LEGO teams – “to uncover the past to discover the future”. Let’s not let it fade away.

Please find below a summary of our conversation.

Where are you from and how does that impact the work you do?

I was born and raised in Lubbock, TX. Lubbock really helped me understand what having a community did because I was actually raised in a community where everybody took care of their neighbors. Like, we really knew our teachers because we lived in the community with them. It was beautiful, because if somebody was sick, my grandmother made some stew or something else, and we took it to them.  This formed my concept of caring for each other and ensuring we all have what we need.

When did you work at CitySquare, and what was your role?

I was volunteering at Central Dallas Church, where we were members, and Larry told me he needed help starting an adult education program in Roseland Homes and at our health clinic on Peak St.   I was working for Aetna, and the work at Central Dallas Church was a welcome change from corporate.  Two to three years after that, the funding ended for that program, and I thought I was going to go find another job. Larry said there are two attorneys, John Greenan and Ken Koonce, who wanted to start a public interest law firm within Central Dallas Ministries, and asked if I wanted to join them.  I said of course.  I became a paralegal, learned all I could and worked at our law firm for five years.  During that time, Larry decided we really needed to focus on housing now that we had hunger, health, and law and other community programs.  He and John Greenan started meeting with Dallas Housing Authority and other housing leaders.  John asked me if I wanted to join him in the housing work and I worked with the CDC as the Director of Projects through 2012.  We started with smaller apartment buildings that housed youth in our TRAC program. We all learned as we worked alongside the community, and that led us to take on larger projects like CityWalk at Akard, The Cottages, LoneStar Gas Lofts, and more.

Why did you work at CitySquare?

I was working in the small-business market for Aetna, and I just knew there was more for me to do professionally.  Central Dallas Ministries was an excellent opportunity to do something I was already doing as a volunteer. I loved working with my mom and with the community.  I learned as much as I contributed, if not more. My first office was in the clinic, and I got to work alongside these amazing doctors, and every day was different.  I loved that Larry became like family to us and that he was never afraid to take on new challenges, encouraging me to do the same.

What made CitySquare special to you?

My mom taught me to leave things better than you found them. I loved that we all felt that way at CItySquare.  The neighbors and community members were as invested in me as I was in them.  That exchange and relationship we had with them was and is special. I still have relationships with staff and community members who have become family. I also better understood how to help address systemic barriers.  I loved that we could provide supportive services to neighbors taking a GED class or living in one of our properties.  Providing comprehensive services was so important.  I took all of those lessons from Central Dallas Ministries/CitySquare as I worked with my mom in the YES program for youth, and we founded Tapestry, a non-profit dedicated to breaking the cycle of domestic violence.

What is the legacy of your contributions to CitySquare?

One of my main contributions over the years was activating gifts in people that they didn’t know they had or giving them space to lean into their gifts. I also walked in faith and worked with so many unknowns in all of my roles. Of course, part of my legacy is our housing projects, like CityWalk, and the community we built with neighbors, volunteers, partners, and board members over the years.

What are you doing now?

I live in Seattle now and work as a Housing Developer with Homestead Community Land Trust. I love that I get to continue much of the work I did at Central Dallas Ministries and CitySquare in Dallas, partnering with community members and local churches throughout Seattle as we bring new affordable housing solutions to the area.

Though it is certainly not life and death, a parallel confusion is evident in discerning what is real and what is fabricated from news and social media to homework that is completed with little or more than a little help from AI. As a parent and university professor, the confrontation of truth vs. fake is nearly constant.

I grew up in Mumbai/Bombay, India where guns were not plentiful except on Bollywood screens. Parents could send their children on play dates without worrying about whether the adults in the house had guns.

Here in the U.S., it is different. Plentiful daily gun violence belied the use of guns for protection.  Guns made mass shootings –where more than four people are shot –entirely possible and probable. In the U.S., there were nearly 340 mass shootings from South Carolina to Minnesota to Mississippi.

But beyond the encounters between a police officer and an individual out in the streets, a doorbell ring is taken to be a home invasion and one can never be sure who has a gun and who does not. We are suspicious of each other and have to overcome more than shyness to build community.

In the age of AI, one can never be sure what is real and what is fake, what is disinformation and what is truth. To be sure, mortality is not at stake with the ubiquitous AI use, but the future is.

In schools and colleges, the rise of large language models (LLMs) is making essay writing a breeze with just a prompt. I have struggled with assessing how much a student has written is their own work.  Now that the first semester of the year is half completed, it is critical to examine how to deal effectively with AI use before more knowledge learning is lost.

It is necessary to treat LLMs as new ways of accessing the digital world, replacing search engines, much like the calculators replaced the slide rules.  A 2025 study of more than 12,000 high school and college students shows that 97% of the students use AI in their assignments. It should be noted that not all use of AI is cheating.

As in other domains, we are using AI to solve problems created by AI. It is possible to run the term papers through various plagiarism-detection software and decide to set the checking software at the level of a phrase or of a sentence, or at the level of an inarticulately paraphrased but correctly cited scientific paper. Then, assessing if say a plagiarism score of 10% (on some hastily defined scale) is sufficient to initiate punitive actions. There is little guidance from college administrators or the developers of such software packages.

Perhaps developers are waiting for the real-world training instructors inadvertently provide to improve their packages. Perhaps in less than a year, they will post data with confidence intervals based on the behavioral patterns of students and teachers.

To be fair, cheating has always been prevalent in schools and colleges. And, instead of bribing a classmate to write your essay, you need only write a prompt in ChatGPT.  As always, it is up to the instructor to decide how much thought, agony and learning went into a term paper.

But we lose something when we begin each encounter with a stranger or read the first lines of an essay from a place of suspicion. Instructors wonder if the student did really write this, how much came from them and how much was an LLM, and more importantly, do the students understand what they have written.

There are some dire warnings of the use of AI. As recent research shows it can result in, “The erosion of trust, the hollowing-out of the student–teacher relationship, and the further commodification of learning threaten to precipitate a legitimation crisis for the academy itself.”

One solution may be to go old school on this one and use pen and paper in class.  And also to really get to know the students IRL.

Separated based on race in U-Hauls,
they waited hours for their captors
to release them, no due process,
no access to lawyers, detained
without constitutional rights
in a land known for freedom,

our city under siege.

Where are you from, and how does that impact the work that you do
I was born in San Diego, CA. But when I was 4, right before kindergarten, my parents moved us to the tiny, tiny island of Guam because my parents were ministers in the Christian Church. I lived in Guam for the formative years of childhood. I moved back to the mainland United States in the middle of my junior year of high school. Guam is a tiny little place where everybody knows everybody. I think the total population of Guam when I was there was about 100,000 people. So yeah, and it’s 30 miles long and 8 miles wide. So it’s like a small town, right? If somebody grew up in a small town, they would very much understand the sort of upbringing I had, where you know or are related to everyone. You definitely know everyone’s business, and that comes with good and bad. It’s nice to always have a guy for a thing like a mechanic, a baker, or whatever you need, but it has drawbacks. I think that growing up as a young black girl, and a child of ministers, in a place where I could actually count the number of other black people on my fingers and toes that I knew and was surrounded by, definitely shaped my life and the work that I do today. It helped me to see systems, power, and community, and what it meant to have your needs met or not to have them met.

When did you work at CitySquare, and what was your role?

I was there from 2010 to 2012, and my role was Manager of Donor Relations. My role was really about helping to elevate the voice of the organization to the people who could help fund the work we were doing, to humanize the work for our donors, and implore them to move from empathy to action.

Why did you work at CitySquare?

Right before I came over to City Square, I was at Habitat for Humanity, and I had been with the North Texas Food Bank. So I always knew of CitySquare because they were a pantry of the North Texas Food Bank, and similar to Habitat, they were working on housing as well.  CitySquare had a very poignant and unapologetic focus on social justice, and I didn’t see a lot of other nonprofits being so stark and so 10 toes down at that time. I was like, these people are about that life, and I think these are my people. And I believe these things too. And I feel like at that period of time, right after the recession and those early 2010s, I personally felt that nonprofits were so sanitized in the language. We are so focused on the feel-good, nicey, nice, goody two-shoes aspect of what people had known nonprofits for. And people still thought of nonprofits as charity, not as justice work. And I think because my parents were ministers, it instilled a deep belief that justice has to be both systemic and personal.

What made CitySquare special to you?

Right before I came to CitySquare, I had been going through a process of deconstructing both my faith and my political beliefs. It really affirmed my awakening. I had already been starting to have it, but that awakening of deconstructing what I was taught about democracy, equity, and who deserves help. It underscored that for me in ways that I had finally found a group of people where I knew I wasn’t crazy. I was surrounded at CitySquare by people from case managers to community members and donors to Larry, who all challenged me to think more deeply, to act more boldly, and to stay rooted in proximity and community. That time helped shape my political, moral, and professional identity in really lasting ways that I’ve tried to explain to people, and I have ended up just saying you had to have been there. Sometimes there are just people and moments and a convergence in life that is so special that you cannot remake it. And I’ve never once again found a place like CitySquare and don’t know that I ever will. And that’s okay because I received so much from it.

What is the legacy of your contributions to CitySquare?

We were in a growth period when I was there, and I love that I got to bring so many people into the work of CitySquare. We had a development team of four, and then we grew to, I think, at max, to like a team of 12, and we just all happened to be women. This group of women got to shape how CitySquare told its story. We were fundraising and communications, shaping the story told externally to funders, policymakers, and the broader public. I’ve always been a storyteller, so I have my degrees in Communications, and I’ve always wanted to do that work. I’m so proud of the campaigns that we launched, the annual reports we did, and the events we erected. I always tell people that I knew about Cory Booker back when he was the Mayor of Newark, and we brought him to the prayer breakfast, and you all think you’re hip to something. I was like, we’ve been knowing. I hope that I left behind a legacy of using communications and storytelling, not just for marketing, not just for fundraising, but as a tool for justice and truth-telling.

What are you doing now?

So many things. My day job, the jobby job, as I call it, is Executive Vice President at Edelman, the world’s largest communications firm. I teach marketing and change management at Cal State East Bay. I write for MSNBC and Fast Company, and I am a newly minted author (Please check out her book, The Price of Nice, available on October 28, 2025), and I’m a mom too. And so I am still doing the work of justice. It looks a little different today, but similar to what I feel like my legacy contribution to CitySquare was, using truth-telling and storytelling as a tool for justice and for collective awareness and understanding is still what I get to do today. 

The event was created in 1945 and, for me, became intensely personal in 2011.

On a spring morning that year, I hopped on my bike to visit the farmer’s market, setting off to find asparagus and whatever chance might bring. What chance brought that day was a spill off my bike and a blow to my head (a head that wore no helmet), resulting in a coup-contrecoup that caused a seizure and sent blood gushing from my nose and ears. I woke up in the hospital a few days later and slowly processed that I had been comatose.

For a period following an emergency craniectomy, there was no clear indication that I would ever wake up. With assistance, I was able to sit up and begin the first steps of recovery from traumatic brain injury.

During that recovery, I had to resign from the university where I had worked for 12 years, leaving behind professional initiatives I had launched, managed and grown. I re-learned how to climb stairs and drive. I changed the state I lived in, and I profoundly changed my life. The road to recovery is long. I am on it still.

For some time, the disabling effects of my injury were obvious. I moved and spoke slowly. Severed nerves caused hearing loss in my left ear that makes me an annoying dinner table companion if I am seated to your right. Nerve damage also resulted in loss of a piece of my vision in my left eye. I can no longer pluck a baseball out of the air if it is tossed at me from my left side. My sense of balance was severely impacted. I have a limited ability to stand on one leg. I am left-handed, and my right brain injury decreased the strength and coordination of my dominant hand. My already imperfect penmanship became almost illegible.

These long-term impacts of my injury are losses when compared to my abilities before the accident. But they are disabilities that would have been invisible or negligible in my return to work, where, for instance, I am rarely required to stand on one leg. We encounter such disabilities every day without registering that we do.

In my classrooms, on the first day, I tell the students that I may not see a raised hand on my left and that they should help each other out and call my attention to their classmates who are signaling willingness to participate. They do, and often some of them will, in response, point out their own blind spots or difficulties hearing.

Prior to my accident, I pioneered developments in digitization and in the creation of online information resources. I was an important voice in the development of academic library publishing. And, as this month seeks to acknowledge, I have continued to make substantial contributions to the workplace. I helped scholars realize the potential of sharing their scholarship widely and in innovative formats. I have educated hundreds of librarians, and I now direct the No. 1 ranked library and information science master’s degree program in the United States. I have authored several articles and published two books. All of this has been accomplished despite, or perhaps because of, my non-obvious disabilities.

Shortly after my accident, my then-employer’s risk management office looked at the scores of my cognitive tests and deemed that my executive function was too impaired for me to successfully do my job. When the Social Security administration denied my disability claim (as it tends to do for traumatic brain injury sufferers), it suggested that I could be gainfully employed as a newspaper clipper. But I was apparently not able to run an academic library or a university press.

The opportunities for which National Disability Employment Awareness Month advocates were not available to me.

In 2013, I was hired in a faculty position at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. My salary and my record of scholarship and teaching would indicate to many people that I am normally capable now. Colleagues and collaborators who do not know about my medical history are taken by surprise when I describe my injury and the extent of its impact on my abilities.

During recovery, I had a successful cranioplasty, but my excised skull flap had spent so much time in a freezer waiting to be reunited with my skull that it warped and will never sit flush. I have a permanent indentation that my then-elementary-school son cheerfully described as “Like a cheerio bowl in the head.” To convey the gravity of my injury to a new acquaintance, I sometimes put their hand on the dent in my head, now helpfully covered by hair. There are winces and small gasps in response, but mostly people say, “I never would have known.”

I am normal. I am disabled. Aren’t we all?

Several of the medical professionals with whom I worked with throughout my recovery _— a group of people whose intelligence and dedication are an extraordinary gift to those they serve — told me that I was a miracle.

My emergency neurosurgeon told my family that she had never seen a brain so damaged. I am a teaching case for the emergency orthopedic surgeon who patched together my broken clavicle and shattered elbow despite skepticism from his colleagues that I would ever be functional enough to use them. He shows his students a picture of me, playing with one of my children, and tells the students it’s always best to assume recovery.

Another doctor, who questioned whether my treatment was worth the investment, given the extent of damage, called me over for a celebratory photograph when, two years later, she realized I had just beaten her in a neighborhood 5k race.

My story isn’t meant to downplay the damage caused by traumatic brain injury and its lasting impact. I am asking that we not measure our abilities or those of others against some yardstick of normalcy that simply doesn’t exist.

In keeping with the aims of this month, I urge all of us to respect the limitations of those we work with, and, more importantly, recognize their potential. All of them. All of us.

I was, and I am badly broken. A broken miracle. We all are. We need opportunities, in the workplace and in the world, to demonstrate that.

As a trained social psychologist, I’ve spent nearly two decades serving as a crisis hotline, peer, and grief counselor for hundreds of people from around the world. I’ve been an outcry witness, held people experiencing suicidal ideation, supported families and communities who have lost loved ones to suicide, and have been the only person who knew where to find the notes my friends left behind because I knew them – and because I knew where I would have left my own. 

The statistics on suicide rates in the US are staggering. At one death every 11 minutes, it is one of the leading causes of death, the rate increasing by 37% in the past 25 years. In 2023, 16.5 million people seriously considered and/or made a plan for how to escape their pain. That same year, 1.5 million people made a documented attempt, with 49,000 people dying, most of them Indigenous Americans and people aged 15-85+. The risk is both evenly and unequally distributed among us all. 

Studies show many suicides are attributed to feels of “dread, despair, loneliness and hopelessness.” Other factors include academic performance, economic standing, financial struggles, and of course, mental health. Another major factor is the nature of the society in which we live, and as a society, we must work intentionally to create a world where we don’t just survive, but thrive. 

To be sure, we are living in a moment where resources like the National Suicide Hotline for LGBTQ+ youth are defunded, reproductive and abortion care are gouged and restricted across the US, and $182 billion dollars per year are ‘invested’ in a sprawling, inhumane mass incarceration system, not to mention the increasing presence of ICE and its ability to surveil and detain those deemed ‘not American enough’.

In my practice as a facilitator and educator, I create and uplift resources, spaces, and programs to support the collective, holistic well-being of my communities and networks. And so, since we cannot rely on our federal government to lead the way, allow me to offer other ways of navigating these challenging times:

• Seek out Mental Health First Aid classes. These classes are available in-person and online. Participants learn how to identify mental health issues and crises, provide initial help and stabilization, and find and contact appropriate resources. The national 998 Suicide and Crisis hotline is also still active.  
• Explore resources like the Open Path Collective, which hosts skilled therapists at sliding scale. They purposefully recruit counselors from diverse backgrounds who are well-versed in both individual mental/emotional conditions, as well as the social conditions that may either help or exacerbate them. 
• Practice learning about and discussing mental/emotional health. I have created a list of media and resources to help begin exploring these topics and be patient; exploring feelings like shame and guilt take time and care.

In a time where ‘Breaking News’ alerts seem to constantly warn of war or deliver another sobering story about gun violence, it is reasonable to be heartbroken and frustrated, to want out.  I understand the pain, the heartbreak, the feelings of despair. I was born as Hurricane Hugo, the first of the superstorms, decimated my island of St. Croix, graduated into two recessions, and have lived my entire life in a world at war, not to mention in the fist of colonization. I’ve also experienced cycles of active and passive suicidal ideation for most of my life. 

At this point, I view it almost as a companion, one I can predict will arrive to spend time with me, sometimes content to quietly observe, and at others, insistent with its purpose – as a warning that I am not the only thing maladapted and unwell. I have suffered greatly, yes, but have been saved by the care of brave, diligent friends, my training and awareness of the resources available to me, and my stubborn insistence on not being beaten by a hostile game I never agreed to play. 

We are not powerless, however. It is important to remember that this is a blink in the eye of human history, that we have agency in how we respond – where we re/direct and pool our attention, effort, care, and skills. Those of us who live, love, and create on the margins of a society that only ever wanted us for the bodies, minds, and spirits it used to build itself know that there are always other paths.

When I reflect on what we can do as a society to address rising rates of suicide, Octavia Butler’s guidance as a skilled, prolific social historian, worldbuilder, and humanitarian ring powerfully true: “There is no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” 

Recall that in New Orleans, in the face of the catastrophic hurricane assigned the name Katrina, it was the levee system that did not hold, that burst sending water gushing back into the Lower Ninth Ward and other impoverished areas. Our project team was exploring what happens to wetland ecosystems when levees systems like the one that broke (i.e., an elevated humanmade barrier or embankment constructed to stop the natural flow of water often to create dry developable land) breach naturally over time. During her presentation, four years before Katrina, the plant biologist said she knew with certainty that if a massive storm hit, the levee systems in New Orleans would not hold. Four years prior to Katrina, she urgently shared this information with government officials, warning them of the imminent threat particularly to poor, elderly, and Black residents if the levee system broke. But instead of taking action to bolster the failing system, she was told: “We have the body bags ready.”

What have we learned in the twenty years since Hurricane Katrina? Twenty years after the dehumanization of the Superdome, the false and racialized narratives conflating looting with survival, the gutting helicopter footage of primarily poor and Black Americans seeking refuge on sinking rooftops, the government, at local, state, and federal levels collectively left the most vulnerable communities to drown and then fight for their lives on their own.

Surely, we’ve made advances since 2005 to increase disaster response. We certainly have. Yet it’s difficult to see that progress as the current federal administration systematically dismantles the upstanding science agencies designed to keep Americans safe. Innovations that include: advances in extreme weather modeling and forecasting, efficient warning systems, effective evacuation mechanisms, comprehensive disaster recovery plans and strategies. For example, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency foundational to our knowledge and understanding of extreme weather events has been decimated and the experts that created and perfected hurricane modeling and tracking have been fired. Likewise, it is the knowledge of experts at the National Weather Service (also part of NOAA) used to issue timely severe weather watches and warnings. Further, these lifesaving warnings and evacuation orders, that allow people time to plan and escape are being silenced.

Just last month Congress unconscionably voted to cancel funding for the Center for Public Broadcasting which supports the very public radio that broadcasts critical extreme weather information to impacted areas, especially in rural regions that may not have access to other information sources. Finally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), designed to help Americans navigate unexpected disasters that leave their lives in disarray was merged with the Department of Homeland Security and lacks leadership and expertise. We saw the consequences of these unconscionable eliminations decisions that allowed incompetence and dysfunction to lead the response in Texas during the floods that took too many lives; urgent calls unanswered, critical funding inaccessible, emergency warning systems failed. The slice of human tragedy we witnessed in Texas is a warning of what is to come on much larger scales as climate change increases the likelihood and severity of extreme weather events. We must act now.

What can we do? How do we maintain hope and possibility as publicly available climate data and tools are erased from federal websites, limiting the ability to make evidence-based decisions? As agencies like the National Science Foundation terminate grants that engage in climate science research because they “no longer effectuate agency priorities;” an experience I know too well, having lost my NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award that supports science teachers and students as community-based climate action researchers.

What we do is we reimagine, we resist, we collectively stand up. For inspiration, I look to sources of bravery and determination in and outside of science including: Data scientists saving and archiving tools that the government has tried to erase, scientists at the National Institute of Health and on, issuing powerful statements of ethics and solidarity; persistent Americans, especially in red states, who attend town halls demanding that politicians answer to them, their constituents; residents of Los Angeles peacefully marching in solidarity with their immigrant neighbors and in defiance of a president who they will not allow to mischaracterize them; artists who reject the attempted erasure of their creativity because U.S. history and politics, in its truth telling, isn’t supposed to be comfortable.

As a professor I see the young people across this nation fighting to be heard, demanding the future they desire and envisioning it into being. We must stand up for science because science can be used to keep us all safe, especially the most vulnerable among us. On the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we stand together as those who not just refuse to be silenced but who demand and reimagine anew.

The City Secretary’s office was confused. They turned me, a licensed attorney trying to turn in evidence of ethics violations, away. 

While I overcame this snafu in a return trip to City Hall, over 14 months later, the City’s Inspector General’s office did the exact same thing again. On February 18, 2025, City-employed investigators turned me, my clients, and our evidence away. The blip of a reason that we received after a supposed 64 week “investigation” was that our allegations were “unsubstantiated” due to a lack of “definitive testimony or sufficient documentation.”  

In 2024, according to Quarterly Reports, the City’s Inspector General’s office received 412 ethics complaints, closed out 471 ethics complaints, and only sent 2 of the 471 ethics complaints it processed onto a formal hearing before the Ethics Advisory Commission.

In 2024, 6 out of 15 seats on the Ethics Advisory Commission were vacant, and 2 out of the Commission’s 4 regularly scheduled meetings were cancelled.

The Ethics Advisory Commission is the only body empowered to actually provide Dallas residents due process on their ethics complaints. The Ethics Advisory Commission has the power to weigh evidence, witness testimony and credibility in a public hearing, and make open and public determinations as to whether City officials violated the Ethics Code. 

“Justice delayed is Justice denied” is not an adequate description for a City Ethics process that allows only .04% of all ethics complaints filed to ever see the light of day in a public hearing. Or for a City Ethics process that took over 14 months to let my client’s well-supported ethics complaints die on the bureaucratic vine.

What do I mean by well-supported ethics complaints? 

As one simple example, we submitted two sworn affidavits confirming that an Environmental Commissioner, while representing the City at a public event, gave the middle finger to two environmental advocates.

This was not “definitive testimony” according to the City.  

The City never required the accused Commissioner to swear under oath that she did not flip off my clients. 

In the old days, justice was determined by witness counting. Under that archaic standard, the sworn testimony of two witnesses warrants not just a hearing but a guilty verdict when stacked up to exactly zero witnesses denying the allegation under oath. 

In Dallas, how many witnesses are required for an ethics complaint to be “substantiated”? Three? Five? Ten? 

The public will never know. The City’s investigation standards (if any exist) are hidden behind closed doors.

This was not the most serious issue we presented. We had video recordings of a Commissioner behaving badly, a threatening letter a Commissioner submitted to the employer of one of my clients, and police reports, police body camera footage, and a court transcript documenting abuse of power.  

But even this was not enough for the City to allow the Ethics Advisory Commission to decide whether these Commissioners violated their ethic obligations.

We knew the City’s process was a joke from day one. 6 weeks after I turned our USB drive into City Hall, I received an e-mail asking for the drive. The City didn’t know it already had our evidence. It took 6.5 months for the City to ask to interview my clients, and then required my clients to sign gag orders agreeing not to speak directly with the Ethics Advisory Commission about their complaints during the investigation. The City then closed out our complaints without a hearing without providing us any process to appeal that decision.

In 2023, the City ran a contest to name its Ethics Hotline, choosing the “Speak Up Line” as the winner. The “Speak Into The Void” line would be more accurate. If you call, there is a 99.96% chance your ethics complaint will be closed without a hearing, and there won’t be anything you can do about it. 

The evidence? A few Instagram posts I made soon after the October 7th attacks, where I sought to explore the internal dissonance one must integrate when one is Jewish and pro-human rights and also has family in Israel, implicating the people they love most in the violence. Ironically, my intended message was about building a foundation of empathy for vital discourse about these subjects.

I have long felt that I should carry around a sign that reads, “Yes, Israel. Yes, that’s my real name. Yes, I am indeed Jewish. No, I am not *from* Israel, just my last name. No, I do not speak Hebrew.” As a perpetual traveler (or outsider, or immigrant, or expat—you decide), the questions are a near-daily occurrence.

Now I would add to my sign: “No, I do not support or endorse genocide. Yes, I realize it is happening in my literal name. No, I do not consent.”

Yes, Toby Israel is my real name. I travel regularly to Israel to visit my brother, sister-in-law, and little niece and nephew. On my most recent trip, the immigration officer looked at my passport, looked back at me, and said, “Wow, that’s a very … patriotic name.” She meant it as a compliment, and it’s Israeli immigration, so I kept my face neutral.

However, every time I introduce myself with the “patriotic” name I have carried my entire life, I question what it means to belong to a nation, to belong to a people. I wonder if we can ever truly disown that—or if we should.

I know there are people close to me and many more like them who care about human rights and justice, but perhaps feel that their safety must trump someone else’s. That their survival depends on another’s destruction.

It doesn’t work that way.

As “Jewish Currents” editor-at-large Peter Beinart put it last week on The Daily Show, “Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and in some ways Jews around the world, are bound up in a single garment of destiny. […] In the long term, Israeli Jews are only going to be safe if Palestinians are going to be safe. And Palestinians can’t be safe unless they’re free.”

On October 7th, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages.

Since October 7th, 2023, as B’Tselem’s new report confirms, “Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

“The evidence shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system and other vital systems necessary for the population’s survival,” in other words, genocide.

There is no excuse or justification for genocide. Ever. The actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank are unconscionable; this has been true for a long time.

The actions of Hamas on October 7th were also unconscionable.

To be clear, these are not equivalent situations. Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack has killed over 60,000 Palestinians and displaced over 90% of Gaza residents—a disproportionate use of force enabled by decades of military occupation.

When I call both situations unconscionable, I seek to reiterate the simple truth that every life lost is a tragedy.

Certainly, antisemitism is on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 360% rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since the events of October 7th. The world seems to be regressing; in 2024, ADL reported that “younger Americans are more likely to endorse anti-Jewish tropes” than previous generations. Similarly worrisome trends have been observed with anti-Muslim sentiment.

Certainly, I worry about my family’s safety every day, and I ruminate constantly on the world that my niece and nephew are growing up in and into; it is not the world I want for them or anyone.

However, a genocide will not make me or my family safer. It is time to put that rhetoric to rest.

And, spreading disinformation—about Jews or Palestinians, or anyone else for that matter—or directing our outrage at individuals is not a useful strategy when it is our governments that make, sell, and drop bombs.

I am telling these stories about my name because I think they are indicative of the deepening trend of polarization and flattening of discourse.

A title is not the whole story of an article; a name is not the whole story of a person. In both cases, the content probably didn’t choose its labeling, but rather an editor or a parent. I think we know this, yet how many of us have read an article title and immediately jumped to outrage, or disinterest, or solidarity? We do the same to people. We see their name and decide we know who they are: Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, friend or foe, for or against, victim or aggressor.

A name is an inheritance. So is, for many of us, our religion, culture, history, and trauma. We do not choose these things, and yet, they so often define us—unless we decide to define them.

I grew up hearing my mother on every phone call to the bank, doctor’s office, or school spelling out our family name: “Israel-like-the-country? I-S-R-A-E-L.”

Nowadays, what could I say that is not fraught? “Israel-like-the… well, you know.”

I have considered leaving out my last name in introductions or meetings to avoid discomfort, so heavy it is to carry this inadvertent endorsement in my Zoom calls, my byline, and my daily interactions. Yet, that feels like a cop-out.

No, I am not my government. I can—and I do—denounce the government of the United States for its direct responsibility in Israel’s ongoing assault on Palestinian life and safety as the largest purveyor of arms to Israel. I can and do denounce the Israeli government for its ongoing genocide, as well as its decades-long practice of settler colonialism.

Still, Israel enacts that violence quite literally in my name. They claim me—they claim us, Jews, descendants of survivors—as the justification for their actions.

The truth is, hiding my name would only obscure the most public face of the issue. My inheritance as a Jew and as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors is woven into my DNA, my heart, and my worldview. I cannot change that with the flick of a pen—nor would I want to.

It is precisely that inheritance that informs my sense of social justice, my passion for peace, my deep-seated belief in the sanctity of every human life. Why would I ever want to change that?

We don’t choose our inheritance. We choose what we do with it.

As a Jew born and raised in the diaspora, I believe that “never again” means never again for anyone—or it means nothing at all.

As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I reject the callous and cynical use of my story and my trauma to justify war, apartheid, and genocide.

As the great-granddaughter of Jewish refugees who chose the name “Israel” to begin their new life in the U.S., I decide what my name will represent today.

I am by no means a religious scholar, but in my Judaism, there are many ways to interpret a story, and even a word, not all of them literal.

In Jewish tradition, names carry profound weight. “Israel” was the name Jacob received after wrestling with an angel, literally meaning ‘one who wrestles with God.’

When I refuse to let the Israeli government’s actions speak in my name, I’m not (only) playing with words. I’m engaging in the centuries-old Jewish practice of wrestling meaning from inheritance.

What if the promised land were the safe, hallowed ground where we came together in community—anywhere in the world—to break bread, laugh and cry and pray together, and remind ourselves that we belong to one another?

What if the promised land were not a place, but a state of being: peace and safety for all of us, each of us sacred, whole, and worthy of life and dignity?

We are so far from that land today, but my name reminds me of my ancestors’ hope:

One day, we will arrive.

It may be a luxury to play with words while some are dying, but I believe we must expand our imagination of what is possible if we ever hope to build a different reality.

And, if it reminds me—or you—of our shared responsibility to be a voice for peace, then it has been of benefit.

I hope you remember to read beyond the titles and labels around you. Remember that much of the most important work—listening, educating ourselves, deconstructing the identities we inherited, and having difficult conversations—may be invisible, but it is the foundation of sustained social change.

I stand by my words from nearly two years ago: I do not pretend to know about solutions, but I know empathy has to be part of the puzzle, if not the table the puzzle is assembled on.