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Last year I proclaimed myself as a writer. I challenged my doubts. I stopped seeing greatness as a separate, unattainable entity. I relaxed my shoulders and gave birth to myself.
This year, I’ve decided to introduce my words to the world. I am terrified. The image that most have come to know of me is light because my writing holds my weight. It is heavy. It is hard. And it wants to heard. My art holds space for me in a way I haven’t found anywhere else, thus allowing me to be easy in public.
I am leaving my comfort zone to stand in my power. I will unpack my insecurities. I will speak my truth.
Peace and light,
Shay Australia
Academic Integrity: A Short Answer For Those Who Question Why We Teach
Dec 01, 2017 6 years ago“We are women. Everything we do matters. I am not my sister's keeper; I am my sister.” - Iyanla Vanzant To be a Black womban under whiteness is to be taught to loathe yourself. It means rarely seeing representations of yourself in media or positions of power. It encourages you to believe that you are irrelevant. Popular images of Black womyn defeminize us as angry, loud, aggressive, “superwomyn” while simultaneously sexualizing us as mammy, tragic mulatto, and Sapphire. Our femininity is questioned regularly and our spirituality is invalidated. But, white people's refusal to acknowledge our magic, does not make it any less real. I grew up in Richmond, California, and was considered “ghetto” before I was considered human. The descriptive words for my community were; dangerous, dirty, and crime-filled. The people who lived there were thought to be lazy and uneducated. I went to schools where the students, teachers, and staff looked like me but, the people I learned about did not. The history books were filled with information about white people, written by white people. The English that we spoke at school was different than the English I spoke at home. The games and music that were so important to me meant nothing in an academic setting, and the foods that I had grown up eating were rarely acknowledged as a balanced diet. All of this taught me that the social components of my immediate environment were unwanted. My neighborhood, my community, and my identity were wrong and improper. I was so detached from much of the material provided inside my classrooms. I moved from grade to grade without ever understanding anything that had been taught to me. The inability to relate most of what I was learning to my personal life made it difficult for me to retain information. I got by on my talent of following directions. I did very well in school because I was able to regurgitate whatever my instructors fed me. Eventually, I formed a distrust of educational institutions in general. Fear that I was being indoctrinated rather than educated. This miseducation is a common reality for Black girls with low-income in schools throughout the US. So when they asked me how I planned to leave my name on this world, how else was I supposed to answer? Growing up in a post-civil-rights era, during the age of Obama, with the skin I'm in, I HAVE to carry Julie Dash's work to the next generation. I have to pay my dues with cultural capital. If not, who will?
