I am valooming with thoughts. Let me preface: this writing has no structure. I haven’t formatted it into any clean collection of order. I don’t have the mental capacity to do so. I have no idea where to begin.
Lately, I’ve become something of an expert in introductions. At first it was simple: my name, my bachelor’s in philosophy, psychology, and religious studies, and that I’m now a graduate student, though without a program, taking courses to see where I might belong. But by week two, that introduction has already unraveled.
I have committed to anthropology. I’ve found that my courses in anthropology, philosophy, and African & African American Studies aren’t three wandering threads, they weave into one.
In the past week, I’ve had to advocate for myself more than I ever wanted. The whimsical energy of undergrad once was the feeling that school was an easy flow has been replaced by the bureaucracy of the institution. I find myself on the verge of waving a white flag, resting my ambitions. And contemplating why must the pursuit of knowledge be made so difficult through an institution?
Part of my disillusionment comes from my peers: undergrads who monopolize seminar conversations, often spinning out diluted, washed subjective-echoed perspectives. While I want to hear others, I also find myself bobbing and weaving, testing when and how to assert my voice. This is a flaw I recognize as something I need to practice.
And perhaps that is why I’ve chosen these subjects: to train myself to confront. To borrow Audre Lorde’s word, confrontation. Lorde named the elephant in the room and did so beautifully, poetically.
So when our class discussed the dualism of applied versus theoretical academia, I sat in silence while my thoughts vibrated. Applied anthropology, we were told, carries a stigma and is dismissed as mere “social work” or “activism.” Many in the room settled on compromise, a blend of theory and practice. Some argued that the only thing that matters is solving needs: hungry communities need food, not theory.
But I disagree. Feeding the hungry is not enough. Without research into the systems that produce hunger, the problem will not end, it will regenerate, a financial vacuum. To dismiss application as cheap is itself cheap, a refuge for those who hide behind theory. Why shouldn’t the best outcome be the studied applying their study? Why shouldn’t anthropologists partner with social workers and advocates? Why shouldn’t our teachers be people whose lifelong passions match their subjects?
I’ve long said government should be built by panels of philosophers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, social workers, political scientists, councils of knowledge shaping the world. Knowledge is a necessity, yes, and more: it grants voice, purpose, possibility. Our greatest limitations are born of not knowing.
Instead, America’s system runs on profit, not expertise. We joke about majors that “don’t make money,” about graduates waiting tables or making lattes. Specialists are told they’re “overqualified” for work that desperately needs their specialization. The system saves money by paying the untrained less.
The system knows its own design. It sets hurdles not to test intelligence but to filter for those who will uphold it. To belong, you must agree to live within it and pass it on, comfortably, to your children.
That is why applied anthropology is dangerous. It disrupts. It insists that human experience be included rather than washed out.
In philosophy class, we debated Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology’s theory of everything. Can we think of objects independently of our biases? The professor recanted a story of a researcher measuring DMT in plants, who, when perfecting the scientific amount, in research claimed, “the plants tell me.” Most classmates scoffed and offered their opinions on the ludicrous nature of plants or trees talking.
But my perspective, transcends western-ideology, which, poses the nature of senses and the meaning of communication. I would like to ask you, reader, when it is time to water your plants, would you say you plants verbally, akin to human dialogue, tell you it is time to water them? Also, when your dog has to use the bathroom, does he tell you in verbal dialogue of speech in the English language, he must use the restroom?
The answer to both questions is no, dogs don’t speak English, and plants don’t have mouths or voice boxes. And yet, we still know. We sense when the dog needs to go out, when the plant needs water. There is a shift, a signal, a form of communication beyond words. Therefore, plants and animals do talk to us. We are already in conversation with them. It’s only that our senses translate differently than they do with humans.
One major point in our discussion of whether objects can be thought of independently from bias was the role of meaning itself and who assigns it, also from what position. The assertion was able-bodied white men have historically dictated the associations of objects, shaping the lexicon of what counts as meaning.
We have been taught that the nose exists only for smelling, ears for hearing, mouths for speaking and tasting. But why should those capacities be so narrowly confined? In many cultures, the senses are recognized as multipurpose: the body feels the weather before it arrives, listens to what cannot be spoken, interprets more than the five categories allow. Our system of meaning has indoctrinated us into limitation.
Even science, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, defined knowledge through what is seen, tested, and measured. Which means our entire framework of “truth” has been trained to confirm only what endures long enough to be seen while what is fleeting, ephemeral, vanishing, is never verified and therefore never enters the record. Confirmation bias calcified into epistemology.
This is why I brought up history of meaning and associations, human beings themselves, “Black” bodies in particular, have been classified as slaves, pets, savages, objects in American History. Meaning was not self-determined, it was imposed, and for its own gain. The categorization of the “other” has left scars that stretch through centuries, reshaping lives that were never what they were once called. If even humans could be mislabeled and reduced to objects, how could we ever trust any system of meaning that claims authority?
By that logic, every classification is already suspect.
This thought led me to a Netflix documentary on orcas, Blackfish. Its parallels to the history of Black bodies in America struck me immediately. The narrator describes how orcas from entirely different clans—speaking different languages, rooted in different geographies, moving with different rhythms were seized and forced into one tank. To their captors, no distinctions mattered. Externally the orcas appeared the same, so they were collapsed into sameness. In captivity, those erased differences boiled into conflict: the orcas harmed one another, stripped of ocean, kin, and home eventually killed.
The violence was not innate, it was manufactured. Dislocated and contained, the orcas developed stress behaviors, physiological malfunctions, even required antidepressants, much like humans pressed into systems that suffocate. The image mirrored the treatment of African Americans: different cultures and customs flattened into one imposed identity, forced to survive inside structures never built for them.
And like animals in captivity, humans under capitalism are told to perform. We labor for an audience, compensated only once our production satisfies; our paychecks like buckets of fish. Depression, medicated lives, bodies breaking down: the cycle treats symptoms but never the cause. Violence and turbulence follow, explained away as pathology rather than conditions of captivity.
The institutions that profit from animal confinement cannot acknowledge their violence, for it would collapse their business. The same logic holds for America’s racial and economic hierarchies. We have seen several new policies and rulemaking come into account for several racial groups, but not black people of America who were abducted and brought here. To listen to Black voices and to recognize the knowledge systems erased by whiteness, would undermine the very order that depends on profit and silence.
Thus the tale repeats: African Americans, Africans, and many other exploited peoples are treated as products for the U.S. economy. The school-to-prison pipeline is captivity by design. Media scripts around marriage, romance, gender, and “success” are indoctrination for the same profit-driven system.
Meaning is crucial. This legacy of imposed definition lingers. And I challenge you to re-examine what meaning you have attributed you all things. Start with self care, preparing for bed or making your bed in the morning. Where did this meaning come from, and then ask yourself if you would like to keep it.
So yes, within a week, I have been radicalized. But I would resist the label. To call critique “radical” is itself a meaning assigned by the same power structure a white male lexicon that polices dissent. I do not call it radical. I call it the truth.
I could even extend this critique to Taylor Swift and her engagement to Travis Kelce for what it signals: that no matter a woman’s power, she must whittle herself down for a man. Taylor’s music, once my soundtrack, now reads as indoctrination teaching girls that emotions exist to be ruled by male love. That narrative is dangerous and leads young women into eclipsing their lives for male validation. Most young women don’t have Taylor’s wealth or safety net to play out heartbreak as performance art. For them, this script costs everything.
And so, perhaps the most radical act I can commit is this: leaving a digital footprint of my thoughts in a country that once prided itself on free speech.