Radical and Back Again, Part I

One woman's journey from woke to awake

Bravery means confronting what we fear, and what we fear most is often some unsettling truth about ourselves. Yet to discover such truth requires more than bravery, it requires a mind nimble enough to outwit its own thoughts.

In Part One of this three-part series, Talia Bongolan-Schwartz describes leaving her doctoral program in clinical psychology to focus entirely on social justice activism. She also talks about becoming radicalized and the start of her shift back to lucidity.

This is the inside story of how people go woke, a confession from the front lines by one of the movement’s very own. But it’s also a story of self-discovery and of one person’s intellectual odyssey through political seas in which we all now sail.