The Weight of What Remains Unspoken

My body leans back before my mind names why.
Not from disinterest, but from the need for safety.

As an Afro-Latina and Jewish academic, I move through spaces where it does not always feel possible to be whole, to speak truths shaped by lived experience, to name harm, or to hold systems accountable. My presence disrupts a version of peace that is comfortable, white, and fragile.

This is not an individual failure; it is systemic. Too often, academia responds to disruption with defensiveness and performance. Dialogue becomes debate. Objectivity masks ego. Emotion is treated as a liability rather than a source of wisdom. Yet intellectual rigor cannot exist without feeling, embodiment, and relationship.

Learning is collective and relational. It requires humility, vulnerability, and a willingness to be transformed. It is speaking with one another, not at one another.

What I witness instead are trauma responses, the urgency to prove goodness, the refusal to repair, the personalization of critique. These reactions strip humanity from spaces meant to teach us how to sit with discomfort and name power. When we cannot do this with one another, we reproduce the very harm we claim to challenge.

The weight of what remains unspoken lives in the body. It accumulates. And so, I choose not to disappear, but to seek a new home, not as a retreat from rigor, but a return to purpose. I seek spaces rooted in justice, care, and accountability, where learning is trauma-informed, identity-honoring, and liberatory, and where wellness, justice, and education are understood as inseparable.