Moriah Judy
University of Pittsburgh | Oakland
Heinz Programming Area:
Moriah Judy’s interest in medicine took her halfway around the world to study traditional Chinese medicine in Yunnan, China for six weeks. While there, she experienced medicinal cooking, hot spring therapy, tea therapy, and music therapy. She learned how to perform moxibustion, massages, acupuncture, and cupping. She shadowed doctors in the hospitals and witnessed an appendectomy and gout removal from a knee. Every morning, Moriah, would practice taiji in the local park before the daily medicinal lectures. Every evening, she would explore the city after completing her studies. During her stay, she traveled throughout Northern Yunnan where Moriah had a once in a lifetime experience of speaking with a Daoist Lama and a reincarnated Buddha. She witnessed a blind Naxi Dongba Shaman expel evil spirits. She observed and interacted with different cultures in Shaxi, Lijiang, Dali, Shangri-La, and Weibaoshan.
CEE Title: #StopTheShade
Our CEE entitled “#StopTheShade: Exploring the Color Bias” was aimed to incorporate thinking globally with educating locally. We started off our CEE by introducing ourselves and creating a safe zone in which everyone felt comfortable speaking. We then played a clip from a Buzzfeed video on colorism and how it is portrayed across the world. Each table then had a chance to discuss what they saw with questions placed at their table as guide lines. Throughout the program we had them debrief and have round table discussions periodically. Next we talked about the history of colorism. From there we transitioned to colorism globally and in the countries that we visited. Farah presented on her own experiences both as a child and the pressures she had from her parents and when she was in India and what she saw there. Daria recalled an interview she had with a friend from Ghana and told us about the start of small campaign trying to get Ghanaians to love their skin. I then talked about the multibillion dollar skin bleaching industry in China and showed them some commercials advertising these bleaching products that aired in Thailand three years ago. We brought our presentation back to America by talking about the social impact of colorism on Snapchat and a trailer from the Dark Girls Documentary. This lead to the question of how can we #StopTheShade? Our presentation was then concluded with a very empowering poem about the value of our skin colors.