Personal Motivation

This work continues because of what I have seen, up close, about how systems built on racial capitalism shape who lives near what, who gets heard, and whose bodies are treated as expendable.

Life in communities where infrastructure, contamination, policing, schools, churches, and zoning decisions are daily realities rather than abstractions has made environmental justice impossible to treat as a niche concern. The central question is whether Black, Indigenous, working class, disabled, and diasporic communities get to live, breathe, and age with dignity.

Within that context, my work brings together environmental justice, engineering, teaching, public writing, and community based research. As this work steps more firmly into social anthropology, it relies on community research and publicly available data from government, academic, and research institutions to identify patterns, generate empirical evidence, and return fact based analysis to the people and places most affected.

Particular attention falls on the surviving Indigenous peoples of Tidewater Virginia, the African diaspora in Virginia, the role of historical faith institutions in shaping present day systems, and the Filipino and Latino communities in Hampton Roads and Portsmouth.

This vocation is also personal. In my life, I have told stories about myself that were more aspiration than truth. Confession, accountability, and grace have taught me to love reality instead, which is why I now cling so fiercely to evidence, archives, and full historical context. When a contaminated site, a church history, a voting pattern, or a construction project is under study, the aim is for what is said about people’s lives to stand up to scrutiny and to be useful to those most affected.

The work stands in a lineage. Du Bois, Hurston, Septima Clark, Hazel Scott, and countless unnamed elders showed that research, story, teaching, and art can be tools of both resistance and healing. In a small way, this work tries to stand in that line by documenting what is true, building spaces where people can learn and act together, and treating every role I hold as a duty to honor the dignity of those who came before and those with whom I share community.

This work is essential to my ongoing redemption journey.

As a Black lesbian woman, my relationship with God, with other people, and with the more‑than‑human world is inseparable from the histories that tried to deny my full humanity. Faith traditions, especially Catholicism and various Protestant denominations and sects, have been used to build legal and social frameworks that dehumanized and controlled generations of Black people brought to North America involuntarily, justified the torture and oppression of LGBTQ people, and demanded the submission and erasure of all that is coded as female.

Because of that history, I do not treat theology, law, or infrastructure as abstract systems. I read them through the lives of people who were surveilled, policed, pathologized, and preached about, rather than listened to. My work is one way of refusing those old arrangements: telling the truth about how faith has been weaponized, learning from the communities it harmed, and insisting that any claim to be “Christian” must be measured by how it treats Black, queer, disabled, working‑class, Indigenous, and otherwise marginalized lives.

In that sense, environmental justice, community research, and public teaching are not attempts to escape faith, but to practice a different one—to participate in a form of discipleship that names harm clearly, takes seriously the complexity of intersecting identities, and seeks repair in the places where law, religion, and daily life still meet.

I joined the Army in February 2009, went to basic training twenty days after high school graduation in June 2009, and turned eighteen in the middle of that training. I have served honorably in combat, and I am a disabled veteran.

That service is part of a long lineage in my family. My grandfather served in Vietnam, my great‑grandfather served in World War II, and my Black ancestors served in World War I, the Civil War, and even the Revolutionary War. They were Southern Black people who were denied full humanity, yet they endured and fought for the hope of something better.

When I talk about “service,” I mean all of that at once: the formal service of uniformed military duty and the longer, quieter tradition of Black people who labored, organized, fought, and hoped inside systems that were never built for their flourishing.

My family elders held deep convictions about furthering the cause of “the people.” In North Carolina, my maternal great-grandmother taught her Black neighbors to read so they could pass the literacy tests once required for Black people to vote. That kind of everyday organizing and risk is part of the inheritance that shapes how I understand duty.

My work now is one way of honoring that lineage without romanticizing it, telling the truth about what they endured, while refusing to let their sacrifices be used to justify the harms that continue.