As an ally and a scholar of contemporary ethnic American literatures, I have contributed to dialogues about inclusion and equity through my roles as a Graduate Student Instructor at Brown and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Kenyon College. In my classes I teach texts whose central theme is racial inequality and use critical race theory to understand, analyze, and deconstruct racial oppression. All of the courses I have taught, and that I will teach, feature work by people of color writing about the struggle against social injustice. I study these narratives not just because they artfully illuminate the mercurial and complex forces spawning systemic racism, but also because these texts move beyond crisis to craft more critical, caring, and responsive forms of democratic belonging that are relevant and impactful now. 

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Going forward, I hope to proliferate discourses deconstructing systemic racial oppression in the United States and beyond, and to pursue practical solutions for this issue in my private life as well. I am committed to this cause because many of my friends and family are people of color, and I need to do something to make the world a safer place for them. But I will remain committed to anti-racism because—as Coates writes so powerfully at the close in Between the World and Me—the same racialist logic that enables the ravaging of black and brown bodies has licensed the evisceration of the Earth itself. I am committed to the struggle against these forces because it is both a battle for my loved ones and the battle for our collective human home.