This is the year.

This summer was incredible in so many ways. Time and again I felt so deeply engaged in what I was doing – seemingly falling in love with new sets of experiences time and time again. I end my summer inspired by the people I met and energy I encountered working to build social justice movements across the country. I also end it incredibly excited for my final year of school and to start my career – in New Orleans with the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice! It feels like a turning point in a very long- and sometimes frustrating – journey of discovery. It's privileged of me to have any of these types of critiques, but sometimes, being surrounded by high achievers in elite academic institutions meant that trying to craft my own path and be involved in work I really believed in could be very difficult. This isn’t a critique of the people I’ve met along the way – because I truly believe that my friends and family are some of the most committed, intelligent, caring, wonde...

(My father writes many Letters to the Editor that never get published. I thought I'd post one of them here) When it comes to atrocities committed in the name of a race/religion/nation, there are three groups of populations under whose name atrocities are committed: 1) those who are directly responsible for atrocities, 2) the ignorant followers, and 3) silent group who oppose it. The group directly involved with atrocities always represents a very small percentage of the entire population related to it. There is always controversy about what percentage of population is silent. However, being minority or majority, the fact is the combination of the latter two unquestionably represents the vast majority of the people. The latter two groups are the ones that are impacted by the atrocities of the minority; often paying the price long-term as it happened to the Germans being looked at as perpetrators of the holocaust and Muslims being affected by atrocities committed by a small grou...