I Am Woke: Unmasking Race, Gender, and Power From Within a TESOL Affiliate

Introduction

The spectacle of George Floyd, a Black male adult, begging for his life while being pinned under the knee of a white male police officer, Derek Chauvin, for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, resembled a modern-day lynching in broad daylight. This 21^st century lynching, however, was distinctive from its 19^th and 20^th century counterparts in two respects. First, the black and white still images on lynching postcards (Wood, 2018) of agentless, lifeless, Black males paled in comparison to the audiovisual narrative of and by Floyd – a living and breathing lynching victim without agency. Second, the death of Floyd – a Black male born on US soil – sparked outcry not only from other members of the African diaspora, but also from non-Black populations all over the world. His death ultimately sparked an international, multiracial social justice movement and demonstratively signified that the global village had hit its tipping point.

From the perspective of a political scientist and nascent TESOL member (2021), this chapter explores the author’s reflections on her participation in and service to Language Teacher Associations (LTAs), one of TESOL International Association’s large state affiliates (2018 to present), its partner organization (2020) and a local chapter (2020). The theoretical underpinnings of this chapter draw heavily upon Fanon’s (2008) colonizer-colonized and master-slave paradigms to contextualize and delineate how the author – a descendant of a formerly colonized population – leveraged her Blackness (Fanon, 2008) to challenge white power and privilege throughout the LTAs.

In the 50-year history of the TESOL state affiliate, the author was the first non-voting board member to advocate for the creation of two Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) posts. With respect to the partner organization and its 14-year existence, the author was the first voting board member to write a DEI grant – a teacher training initiative – for five language educators representing K-12, university/college, community college, adult education and intensive English program (IEP) contexts. Regarding long-term DEI strategic planning, the author created and leveraged the pipeline of DEI grant recipients committed to social justice as a means of upholding the advocacy goal in the TESOL state affiliate’s mission statement.

This research introduces the Critical Advocacy Framework – an advocacy framework informed by critical consciousness (Freire, 1974), postcolonial theory (Fanon, 2008) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) paradigms that focus on oppressor-oppressed, colonizer-colonized structures and intersectionality, respectively. This chapter also integrates the “iron triangle” (Adams, 1981) model from the American politics field to highlight the patron-client relationship between advocates of Multilingual Learners (MLs) and stakeholders who ultimately determine the fate of MLs within and beyond the English language classroom.

This chapter highlights how the author leveraged her Blackness (Fanon, 2008), experiential and organizational knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs), in a Machiavellian sense, to promote social transformation throughout the LTAs in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. The chapter was written for newcomers, like the author, to the English Language Teaching (ELT) field and the TESOL International Association, MATESOL education program administrators, professors, students and leaders within LTAs themselves who might find the author’s reflected experiences, learning activities, and portraits of practice to be of use.