"I am keishawn!"

so the other day in my motivation class this crazy white girl who always talks about random shit that no one cares about said something very offensive but also extremely hilarious!! let me set the scene. she did teach for america (blah, we already know my feelings on this) in phoenix and loves to talk about how all her students were "lateeeno" with an accent and so she understands now about inequality in education and what not. riiiiiiighhhht. ok so the scene goes like this:

we were all sitting in class, a class with about 5 black people, 2 mexicans, and 5 white people and an asian and we were talking about how to get students (not minority students, just students) more intrinsically motivated to like school and learning for the sheer value of learning, vs. students who are extremely unmotivated. so CWG (crazy white girl) raises her hand and is like

"ok so...it's a nice idea to motivated studetns who are not motivated but how do we realistically do this. because i mean when i see a student and i'm just like...Keishawn, how do i motivate you!????"

now mind you all of the white people i have told this story to kind of just stand there like...um ok what's the big deal. the people of color on the other hand who have heard this all open their mouths really wide and say "nooo shheeee didn't!!!" well anyways the whole keishawn thing got the class in an uproar and everyone was laughing because it was so ridiculous and so offensive because clearly all unmotivated studetns are black and all black people have crazy names like keishawn. clearly, CWG!! so at this point the whole class is trying really hard not to laugh too much but we all bust out and this black girl latoya (ironically enough) yells out "she did not just say keishawn!!" and everyone started laughing harder and the worst part was that CWG didn't even realize she had been offensive. she thought we were laughing at the fact that she was so passionate about these issues of helping little Keishawn. wow...just wow.

i think this serves as a nice little example of what grad school is really like. so then my friend Jamaal and i were talking while CWG was going on and on about motivating the unmotivated and jamaal was like "next week i'm signing my class email to you all 'from keishawn'." I laughed but then i thought about this and i told fernando last night when we were having a party at my house that in reality there is a little bit of keishawn in all of us students of color and maybe we should all sign our emails keishawn in a very "i am spartacus" kind of way. At which point fernando kind of took it to a whole knew level by adding that we should make t shirts that said on the front

I AM KEISHAWN

and then on the back they should say

MOTIVATE ME

so true guys, so true. So today or tomorrow or whatever when you are attempting to get something done and you just can't get motivated think of the keishawn in all of you, and stand up with pride and say to yourself "i am keishawn!!"

*** BTdubs the spelling of keishawn came about when jamaal and i discussed it during class. Like how do we really spell keishawn....and this is the spelling that we came up with.