By Rafael Gomez

Am I an activist? Sure, but aren’t we all?

I have been told that I don’t do real archaeology. That I’m an activist instead of an archaeologist. After job searches where I wasn’t hired, I heard that the committees were concerned with what I would do on campus. I’ve had a university president step in and close a funding line that was being used to hire me. These were never explicitly mentioned as resulting from concerns over my research/activism, but it’s hard not to draw conclusions.

While only some work, like mine, gets accused of being activist, all research is inherently activism. Research involves choosing what questions to ask and how to approach them. Our experiences, values, life histories, and cultures influence these choices. Because I believe it’s essential to be transparent about these influences and to actively work towards creating more equitable and inclusive practices, which are often very different from, even counter to, many researchers’ experiences and values, that transparency is used against me and others who walk similar paths.

Yes, my research is a form of activism that seeks to challenge dominant narratives and create space for marginalized voices and perspectives. I have seen the power of rigorous social justice oriented research to promote and create positive change in the world. Groups like the Indigenous Archaeology Collective, the Society for Black Archaeologists, the Black Trowel Collective, The History Underground, and of course, the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network all demonstrate these values. But research clearly also has the power to colonize and oppress. To inflict violence and create trauma. To dismiss history. These attacks often emerge from implicit value judgments many are unaware they make. We hear this in present calls to teach “real” histories. This happens because these individuals’ personal life histories are normalized, whereas others might not be. But erased or ignored histories are real too.

In research fields like archaeology, we’re told to keep ourselves out of the research, our voices out of the article. Indeed, this is how the scientific method is taught in K-12, even undergrad: you take a hypothesis, you test it with the goal of nullifying it, and then you take those results, modify your original hypothesis, and start over. That’s the simplified version, but as it turns out—well, as we’ve always known—it’s hogwash. Bilge. Full-on flapdoodle.

A scientific method separated from real-world interests and influences is an impossibility. Such an idea requires what I call the virgin birth of science—the immaculate conception of a hypothesis. Hypotheses must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the brains of researchers.

To better understand our research and the types of values we accidentally become activists for, we need to understand ourselves better. Perhaps most importantly for this piece, to better understand others’ research, we need to understand the researcher better. Rarely are we allowed that chance.

Many fields (like Native American Studies) recognize this and call for an intuitive understanding of you as a person: the histories, cultures, morals, and relationships that make you who you are. This understanding helps us not just to be aware of our own biases but also what unique perspectives we bring. Understanding yourself as a researcher isn’t just about producing more objective work. Instead, it’s about understanding the subjectivities that impact your work and finding other subjectivities that might counter those to build stronger, more complex research processes. There’s even a name for this. It’s a feminist concept called strong objectivity, and it’s regularly ignored in favor of what we might call naïve objectivity within Western science.

In reading this, you’ll get something you don’t normally get in a piece about archaeology or history. You’re going to get a glimpse into me, the author, and how my history has informed my work. Hopefully, you’ll think through your own life experiences as you read and start to see why I argue that everyone is an activist researcher.

All things being equal, I should not be an archaeologist. Or a professor. In some ways, yes, absolutely, I should be. I’m a decent-looking white male with good teeth. Research shows those four traits are positively correlated with your ability to find and retain a good job because they are linked with the perception of your intelligence and competence. Put another way, unexamined value judgments influence perception. And these traits are echoed in the U.S. university system. As of 2020, white males account for 32% of assistant professors, 39% of associate professors, and 51% of full professors.  The decreasing proportion of white male faculty at each stage is mostly balanced by increases in white female faculty (38% of assistant professors are white females). That university systems don’t often find value in the research that women conduct and are dismissive towards mothers is reflected in the finding that a lower proportion of white women are professors.

More broadly, the total number of faculty from all minoritized groups (Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American) across both sexes remains relatively constant: 30% are assistant professors, 25% are associate professors, and 21% are full professors. These statistics make two things clear. There hasn’t been a lot of change in how many minoritized faculty are hired, and—statistically—someone who looks like me is more likely to be hired. In the 2020 census, white individuals of both sexes accounted for 57.8% of the total population of the United States. They are heavily overrepresented in universities’ tenure-track faculty.

Even ignoring demographics, it’s still a surprise I ended up a professor. I have a lot of tattoos. A suit and tie can’t cover some. Getting them was my choice, sure, but these choices that fit within my cultural milieu do not fit within the university system. I’ve been in jail three times, but only one was because of an actual arrest (and no, that’s not legal). More importantly, I don’t have any convictions, because I was never breaking any laws. Long stories accompany all of these, but our society doesn’t often listen to these long stories. The reality is I regularly get stopped by police, border patrol, customs agents, and the TSA. I even get followed by store security. Even though movie bad guys are often covered in tattoos, that’s just not the way things are. Yet we live in a world of perceptions that feed unexamined judgments. I’ve been told by a former colleague that I look more like I’m selling drugs to the faculty than a part of it. I’ve been out for lunch with a different colleague and had the server mention they liked my tattoos, only to have my colleague respond, “Can you believe he’s a professor?” These are all instances of microaggressions, the university world letting me know I shouldn’t be there. And these situations are often much worse for my Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) colleagues.

While I am now doing well, I was not raised in a financially stable environment. Growing up, I never knew what my schoolmates would make fun of each day. Was it my off-brand tennis shoes? My sister’s hand-me-down winter jacket that my mom dyed brown but still had a purple zipper? My pencil case with the duct-taped lid? I’ve always been baffled that we shame folks for being poor in a system that requires poverty instead of being ashamed that we’ve created that system. For example, the U.S. has such low levels of social and economic mobility, that the most significant predictor of whether you will achieve financial success as an adult is if you come from wealth. In a 2020 study, we came in 27^th out of 82 countries studied for social mobility. One key reason is that university education, trade schools, and really any schooling past K-12 in this country is expensive.

So, for me, the only way to even get a bachelor’s degree was to take on a significant amount of debt as the cost of a university education skyrocketed in the 90s and 00s.  Luckily, there was a community college near me during my first decade after high school. I picked away at courses while working in nightclubs and entertainment management. During those courses, I realized I was pretty good at school. I might be smart. That was unclear to me during my first 18 years because our K-12 education system is not set up to let folks without specific types of brains thrive.

Community college showed me a new side of learning. And so I started thinking about getting a bachelor’s degree. And somehow, I did it. In high school, graduate school was not on the table. No one in my family even talked about it. I didn’t know anyone with a graduate degree. But as I found myself managing a large-scale research project in undergrad (one that my advisor mentioned should probably have been a master’s degree), I suddenly started thinking about grad school. And somehow, I did it, this time with the help of my spouse at the time and our children. And when I say “somehow,” it was with a lot of pain and debt. Penny-pinching became something of an art form. Keeping my children, my spouse, and myself clothed and fed was a magic act. My ex and I became economic magicians navigating the costly world of being poor. Everything costs more when you’re poor. It’s one of the great unacknowledged hypocrisies of our world.

As I struggled to feed my family during grad school, the urgency of my situation drove me to dig deeper into the world of dumpster diving. That’s how I stumbled upon Food Not Bombs. This nonprofit organization is dedicated to feeding our unhoused neighbors with food obtained through dumpster diving. I eagerly joined their cause.

Food Not Bombs equipped me with new tools and strategies to provide for my family better. As a poorly paid graduate student with expensive, inadequate insurance, I constantly struggled to make ends meet. Without the supplemental food I obtained dumpster diving, I would have had to drop out of grad school. For many, the idea of scavenging through dumpsters for food is unsettling, if not outright repulsive. But again, it’s all perception. Dumpster divers look for sealed foods, fresh produce, and bakery items that are discarded because they’re ugly, returned, or past their “best by” dates (which are not expiration dates). The popular image of someone looking for a half-eaten scrap of pizza is created by ignorant individuals. Almost a third of food in the U.S. is thrown away. Dumpster divers are often activists working against that waste.

When discussing poverty, I’ve noticed I also must be prepared to challenge societal assumptions that contribute to the idea that poor people have failed. I have to contest stereotypes of laziness, financial irresponsibility, and intellectual deficiency and instead get people thinking about how a society’s limited resources are unequally distributed.  Those false values led me to start doing what many in archaeology don’t: look for historic cases where people tried to make egalitarian and equitable societies. In archaeology, these social movements often get dismissed as civilizational collapses. I instead ask if the rise of elites and kings isn’t the enforced collapses of intentionally created and hard-won societies focused on values of sustainability and community care.

In part, approaching old questions with these new frameworks comes from being neurodiverse. This has its own set of unique challenges and advantages. Like shirts, I have many diagnoses. Unlike shirts, I can’t just wear one or two at a time. Neurologists label my major diagnoses as developmental disabilities. Some can be quite severe, including difficulties with executive function, working memory, and sensory processing.

However, my disabilities are not immediately visible to others, which means a substantial portion of my life is spent on things like masking, or the use of extra emotional and mental energy and labor to fit in with what’s considered typical. I need to expend extra energy in social situations to interpret nonverbal cues, keep track of multiple conversations, and filter out sensory information. Neurodiverse individuals do this so that they are not judged for what many consider to be shortcomings. When you disclose your challenges, there’s always a fear that people will underestimate your abilities and decide not to offer you opportunities out of concern that you won’t be able to handle them: “Oh, everything takes Lewis longer, and he’s pretty busy, so we shouldn’t ask him.”

I refuse to be defined solely by what many would label as my pathologies. While I recognize that I have unique challenges that most people don’t face, I also thrive in ways that most people don’t. My neurodiversity gives me a unique perspective on the world. For example, my mind lacks an information filter, which has many downsides, including perpetually feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. But lacking that filter has its advantages. My brain doesn’t unconsciously prioritize what information to retain and what to let pass, so I often don’t have the same tunnel vision that others do. This can allow me to see connections that may not be obvious to others. Being neurodiverse has allowed me to develop creative problem-solving skills and deep empathy for others facing life challenges. Ultimately, I consider my neurodiversity a blessing. I thrive because of it, not despite it.

I want to be clear that this isn’t a Horatio Alger story. I didn’t pull myself up by the bootstraps. Those stories ignore all the things actively working to see you fail and the people that help you along the way. There are thousands, millions, of folks who just didn’t have the random chances or the privileges that come with being a straight, white male coded as able-bodied by most who meet me.

In the end, recognizing just how difficult it is that I ended up in the position I’m in, even with the traits that give me advantages, it became abundantly clear that work needed to be done to reduce barriers and socioeconomic violence within academic institutions for those who are even more affected by the system than I was.

Numbers are difficult to obtain, but studies over the last decade indicate that between 85% and 99.2% of archaeologists identify as white. In 2020, Dr. William White wrote that he worked for a decade in archaeology before he ran across another Black archaeologist. As of 2021, members of the Indigenous Archaeology Collective noted there were only 33 Native Americans with PhDs in archaeology in the United States. This imbalance becomes even more problematic when you acknowledge that the origins of most archaeology investigated in the U.S. is Indigenous.

Outside perspectives can be important in research. But for a century-plus, that’s about all we’ve had, and it’s led to a system that essentially enforces a Western and colonial (and patriarchal and heteronormative) system on archaeological findings and the historical stories we tell. As I’ve previously argued, this value system impacts the heritage we protect, dramatically skewing “the future history” we are building towards one reflecting colonial values. What is this, if not activism?

To protect the past from colonial erasure, we need a diversity of voices in archaeology that, for the most part, we just aren’t seeing. This is a failure on the part of archaeologists who have been unwilling to acknowledge both the scope of their tunnel vision and the violence, discomfort, and trauma minoritized/marginalized individuals deal with in the spaces archaeologists have created. I detailed the aggressions and discomforts I dealt with because mine, while feeling extensive to me, are minute compared to those felt by folks entering institutions and disciplines that are built “upon the bodies, bones, and material culture of Indigenous peoples,” as described in 2021 by the archaeologist Dr. Ora Marek-Martinez (Diné/Nez Perce). We can extend that description to Black, Hispanic, and Asian bodies as well.

While we all have unique histories and backgrounds, seeing only a few people with similar sorts of experiences isolates students and drives them away from fields like archaeology. Not sharing cultural and experiential touchstones with your colleagues when working in a field that is very much centered on creating networks and coalitions can make building those relationships near impossible. Groups like the Indigenous Archaeology Collective, the Society for Black Archaeologists, and the Black Trowel Collective help create spaces for those who otherwise feel very alone. Along with the other groups I mentioned above, they lead the drive towards restorative practices through actions that center care and friendship to empower instead of harm.

Finding and creating groups like these is important because humans have never been successful as individuals. It’s one of the great misdirections of evolutionary research. Humanity’s success has always been our ability to socialize and apply our diverse experiences to complex problems. The solution, it turns out, is collective.

While being open in this manner is personally and professionally frightening, I think it’s important to let folks know there are many more paths of life, types of brains, and diverse cultural histories functioning in this space than it might seem. Knowing about my journey, I hope, can help others realize that there is a dramatic need to change how we think about access to education and research. I hope this lets some students know that there are people here who can help support them. And who knows, maybe this will help more of my colleagues start sharing the experiences that have impacted their research and activism. As someone recently reminded me, sometimes the only way to fill the dance floor is to get out there and do your weird dance on your own. Other feet will soon follow.
And this is where I’ll leave you, with a fist bump and a smile, so that you can ponder, search, and think about where you best fit within humanity’s collective answer. What kind of coalition can you build? Where can you participate? And always remember what type of tree you want to grow when you plant your seed of mutual aid. No one gets a willow from an acorn.