{"id":183,"date":"2016-02-13T15:56:32","date_gmt":"2016-02-13T23:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/?p=183"},"modified":"2016-02-13T15:56:32","modified_gmt":"2016-02-13T23:56:32","slug":"this-week-as-an-artivist-21316-formation-shadeism-goodbye-to-esl-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/this-week-as-an-artivist-21316-formation-shadeism-goodbye-to-esl-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week as an Artivist: 2\/13\/16: #Formation #Shadeism Goodbye to ESL Teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sSCW_3BD0rs?rel=0&amp;controls=0&amp;showinfo=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\nTRANSCRIPT:<br \/>\nHey&#8230;What&#8217;s up, Artivists? How&#8217;s it going? What&#8217;s going on with your goals? Have you reached any of them? I didn&#8217;t get the goal of getting a new show booking last week, but that&#8217;s OK. But some amazing things happened this week &#8211; really wonderful, positive stuff, good stuff for storytelling, good stuff for Artivism, for the stories I want to tell so I&#8217;ll fill you in a little bit on those things.<\/p>\n<p>OK. Beyonce&#8217;s #<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/LrCHz1gwzTo\">Formation<\/a> video came out last week just before the Superbowl and that song in the Superbowl and there was a lot of conversation about LOTS of things in the video, but something that was really important to me was the conversations about #<a href=\"http:\/\/racerelations.about.com\/od\/understandingrac1\/g\/definitionofcolorism.htm\">colorism<\/a> and #<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Discrimination_based_on_skin_color\">shadeism<\/a>, especially in Louisiana, there are people called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Louisiana_Creole_French\">Creoles<\/a> and what I didn&#8217;t know is that Creole does not mean &#8216;light-skinned&#8217; and that was the idea that I had, but a woman named <a href=\"https:\/\/www.colorlines.com\/articles\/jackson-five-nostrils-creole-vs-negro-and-beefing-over-beyonc%C3%A9s-formation\">Yaba Blay wrote an article<\/a> about living in Louisiana and having some really painful moments around shadeism and colorism and I was really moved by her piece and so I posted about it, and then some other folks from the Mixed and Creole community came on a were like, &#8220;Wait a minute &#8211; her analysis is lacking the fact that there are lots of Creole people who are &#8216;dark-skinned&#8217; and it has to do with the geographical area you&#8217;re in and so it was really a great conversation &#8211; so shout out to Carolyn Battle Cochran, Joahana Workman, to Senta Burke for sharing your very personal story on our thread and I thank you so much. I just want to keep talking about things and I know I&#8217;m going to get things wrong, especially when it&#8217;s something I have zero context on &#8211; so I just appreciate the conversation and let&#8217;s keep that going.<\/p>\n<p>On Tuesday I went to #<a href=\"http:\/\/www.scpr.org\/\">KPCC<\/a>, which is our local #NPR station &#8211; one of our local NPR stations here in LA and had an interview with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scpr.org\/about\/people\/staff\/leslie-berestein-rojas\">Leslie Berestein Rojas<\/a> &#8211; she&#8217;s doing a story about #multiracial identity in Los Angeles and so that&#8217;s coming out on Monday. It was a wonderful opportunity to talk a little bit about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.onedropoflove.org\/\">One Drop<\/a> and talk about my experiences being a Mixed person growing up and how I&#8217;ve evolved around that and how my focus more is on justice &#8211; so we had a great conversation and I&#8217;ll put a link once that comes out and I&#8217;ll talk about it more next week.<\/p>\n<p>While I was at KPCC, I met Liz Garbus, so anyway I hugged her and said thank you for her documentary &#8211; <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.netflix.com\/title\/70308063\" target=\"_blank\">What Happened, Miss Simone<\/a><\/em> if you didn&#8217;t see it, I believe it&#8217;s still on Netflix. It&#8217;s really powerful &#8211; speaking of shadeism and colorism &#8211; it is very, very clear in this movie, so check out that documentary.<\/p>\n<p>OK so, I have been an ESLTeacher for the majority of my life at this point &#8211; I started teaching ESL after I joined the&#8230;when I joined the Peace Corps right after college. I lived in West Africa and I taught ESL and I coordinated the English Department in the Cape Verdean Islands, West Africa and I&#8217;ve been teaching ESL pretty steadily ever since then everywhere. In New York City, in a high school in the South Bronx, I taught 5th grade for one year &#8211; a bilingual 5th grade class. I then taught in a few schools in Los Angeles including CalAmerica, where I met my husband Diego and&#8230;oh my gosh, maybe I&#8217;m going to cry. After that I taught at East LA College for a long time and then for the last 8 years or so I&#8217;ve been teaching at Glendale Community College, where the majority of the students are Armenian, we&#8217;ve recently had a lot of Syrian students come in and still there are also Latin American students mostly Guatemalan and Mexican and Salvadorian and Thursday was my last day teaching. And so I&#8217;m &#8211; whooo &#8211; I&#8217;m making a transition I can talk about the transition probably in next week&#8217;s video, but teaching ESL has been such a wonderful, wonderful, part of my life for the last 20 years and I will miss it so much. I&#8217;ll miss my students. I will certainly infuse my new job with everything. All the incredible tools that I learned and I&#8217;ll also maintain my relationships with the communities that motivated me to be grateful for everything that I have and to be grounded and to really understand what things are important in life &#8211; and that those are not material things &#8211; and they are not about money and power, they are about community, they are about family, they are about LOVE. And so I&#8217;m saying goodbye to ESL teaching, but not to my life as an Educator and to my life as a person who&#8217;s committed to justice and equity for everyone. So I want to say thank you &#8211; if you&#8217;re one of my students &#8211; I will miss you so much and you have made my life wonderful and THANK YOU for that. And you have my email address, so email me any time, and I&#8217;ll remind you how to use &#8216;Be&#8217; verb correctly and &#8216;what is a noun&#8217; and &#8216;what is a subject pronoun&#8217; &#8211; I&#8217;ll remind you of all of that, so I am still your friend forever.<\/p>\n<p>I am so proud, I have to say, of the students at CalState LA. So I went to CalState LA for my MFA and the students there have made a<a href=\"http:\/\/afrikanblackcoalition.org\/2016\/02\/10\/black-student-union-at-csula-accomplishes-historic-institutional-changes\/\" target=\"_blank\"> list of demands<\/a> to the President of CalState LA. I&#8217;m going to put the link so that you can read. And they got it! They got the things that they were asking for &#8211; including divesting from private prisons, money to support their work &#8211; it&#8217;s so exciting. I&#8217;m so proud. And congratulations, keep up the amazing work you&#8217;re doing.<\/p>\n<p>And shoutouts to everybody who&#8217;s been watching these videos!\u00a0Thank you for watching them, thank you for your &#8216;likes&#8217; on the videos. Please subscribe if you haven&#8217;t and also interact with me. I&#8217;m sorry I know this is a lot of just talking at you, but I don&#8217;t mean it to be, what I mean it to be is to hear from you your thoughts and questions. Let&#8217;s talk about Shadeism, ESL students if you&#8217;re watching you can ask me questions about grammar, and Artivists &#8211; what&#8217;s going on for you this week? What are your goals? What are you planning on getting done? What did you get done last week? Let me know. Let&#8217;s talk about it. What do you need support on? Have you got projects going that you need support on? Alright everybody have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week. I&#8217;ll have great, amazing news for you that I can share next week. And until then: Bye Bye!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TRANSCRIPT: Hey&#8230;What&#8217;s up, Artivists? How&#8217;s it going? What&#8217;s going on with your goals? Have you reached any of them? I didn&#8217;t get the goal of getting a new show booking last week, but that&#8217;s OK. But some amazing things happened &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/this-week-as-an-artivist-21316-formation-shadeism-goodbye-to-esl-teaching\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[38],"tags":[74,40,71,18,69,72,34,66,35,27,29,36,4,70,14,23,39,28,10,75,73,16,19,31,6,25,17,20,24,33,11,68,41,26,32,22,21,67],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-week-as-an-artivist","tag-andrew-jolivette","tag-artivism","tag-beyonce","tag-biracial","tag-colorism","tag-creole","tag-critical-race-theory","tag-csula","tag-cultural-studies","tag-diversity","tag-equity","tag-ethnic-studies","tag-fanshen","tag-formation","tag-history","tag-identity","tag-immigration","tag-inclusion","tag-intersectionality","tag-kpcc","tag-louisiana","tag-mixed-race","tag-mulatto","tag-non-traditional","tag-one-drop-of-love","tag-one-woman-play","tag-one-drop-rule","tag-race","tag-racial-identity","tag-racial-justice","tag-racism","tag-shadeism","tag-socially-conscious","tag-solo-show","tag-underrepresented","tag-white-privilege","tag-whiteness","tag-yaba-blay"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":184,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanshencox.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}