Submitted by: Monika L. Son, Assistant Professor, Chair and Director, Percy Ellis Sutton SEEK Department, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
To read online: We Are Woke: A Collaborative Critical Autoethnography of Three “Womxn” of Color Graduate Students in Higher Education
“This critical collaborative autoethnography examines how three “womxn” of color (Asian American, Latina, and African American) graduate students experience and resist intersectional racism and sexism in higher education. The authors reflect on their individual journeys to “wokeness” and share their collective process of cultivating a community of “sista” scholars integral to their wellness, wokeness, and persistence in an oppressive educational system.”
To be woke
is not just a political ideology,
It is an unretractable existence
A contradictory remedy of healing and pain.
The cultivation of a deep and necessary consciousness of survival
that slices white patriarchal supremacy
and wounds the heart—opening minds.
Our eyes never shut. Our voices never seize.
We are courageous, we are fierce, we are exhausted.
And yet we persist. We are Alive. We are here.
We are WOKE.
This study was accessed in the ERIC database, which is open and a government document. The study was published in the International Journal of Multicultural Education, v. 19, No. 1, 2017. Authors are Aeriel A. Ashlee, Bianca Zamora and Shamika N. Karikari, all of Miami University.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
