It’s AmeriCorps Week! Every year in March, a cheerful email celebrating AmeriCorps Week drops into my inbox, and I am reminded of how I became homeless 6 months into my term of service. Earning about $3 per hour from my AmeriCorps living stipend, I think about the hypocrisy of a government-funded program paying people less than minimum wage as the debate rages on over raising the federal minimum wage, student loan forgiveness, and the legality and ethics of unpaid internships. I remember AmeriCorps Orientation Day, when everyone seated in the North Seattle hotel conference room gasped as we were taught…

Kyrsten Sinema’s 2018 senate race campaign was a joke. No, really. I mean it literally. Two hundred years ago, the idiom about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was a joke about how ridiculous it would be for a man to pull himself out of a swamp or over a fence by grabbing hold of the bootstraps on his shoes. And yet, what was originally meant as a joke when Andrew Jackson was president, is today a socially acceptable way to scold poor people for being poor.

Dungeness crab. You find it on restaurant menus from New York to Seattle. And you find it stumbling over rocks in the Salish Sea’s quiet bays and estuaries, all along the coast near Sequim, Washington (pronounced “skwim” in the Klallam language). Windswept bluffs rise above the famous crustacean’s namesake, Dungeness Bay, so named by Captain George Vancouver on April 30, 1792, when he decided that it looked like the English coast of Kent. Captain Vancouver’s own name is also plastered over the communities of what we now call Vancouver, B.C., Vancouver Island, and Vancouver, Washington. When my little sister was…

Trigger Warning (child abuse and CPS negligence)

Last night, Kellyanne Conway posted nude photos of her daughter on Twitter. Less than a week ago, the night before Biden and Harris’s inauguration, Twitter was outraged by leaked videos of Kellyanne Conway threatening her daughter with: “You’re lucky your mom’s pro-life!” Tweets that CPS needed to be called popped up across the timeline. Many people who barely survived their own abusive parents gently replied, explaining that it is naive to think that CPS (Child Protective Services) will investigate a powerful, wealthy white mother. …

*Trigger warning

Last Wednesday, QAnon flags waved in the winter D.C. wind as followers stormed Congress. Watching the siege unfold, I thought of the irony of QAnon followers’ violence and their dubious claim to care so much about trafficked children. Afterall, 2016’s Pizzagate is when QAnon entered the public’s consciousness.

A week after the siege, I finally received a call back from a Child Protective Services (CPS) case worker. I had been waiting for this call since November 26 when I found out that CPS had placed my 3 month old niece with my father, a man who molested me…

What does it mean when many of the cadavers used for biomedical research are the bodies of poor people who, when alive, never could have afforded the treatments they helped develop for the wealthy?

In the throes of grieving a loved one, many families discover cadaver donation companies when they have to seek alternative ways to cover funeral expenses. Although for-profit whole body donation companies do not track the income or socioeconomic data of donors, public reviews online and my own experience working as a coordinator suggest that a large majority choose to donate their bodies to science out of…

The night of the 2016 election, I heard gunshots and neighbors sobbing four stories below my apartment. The morning after the election, I walked into the OB/Gyn clinic that I worked at. Normally our workday started with cracking jokes and offers for coffee runs. But on that morning four years ago, it was somber and silent. Everyone, including patients in the waiting room looked like they were on the verge of vomiting or crying. Before I even sat down at my desk the phone rang.

A woman’s voice: “Hello, I need an IUD. The kind that lasts 5 years.” Normally…

I call myself a child trafficking survivor because “trafficking” is more succinct than explaining how my dad pimped me until age 10. But the term that once offered me solace with its linguistic distance from the more graphic realities of my childhood has been co-opted. The word I could use to explain my fear of men in white trucks has been hijacked by QAnon conspiracy theorists. In recent years, the word “trafficking” has been rendered meaningless and sensationalized through the political commodification of real survivors’ trauma. And this is harmful to us all.

The “Q” in QAnon is allegedly a…