Diversity Event/ Digital Story Telling Project

I went to “Politics, Policy and the Reality of Leadership” with Gwen Ifill on Wednesday night last week. Gwen Ifill is moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent for The PBS Newshour. She is also the author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Gwen talked about some issues of being a black women and struggling to succeed. In order for women to succeed, they have to break through some glass ceilings. When they do break through the glass ceilings, women should bring their youth with them even though they might not want to fallow.

I learned a few things about what black women go through working to succeed in the work force of a leadership role. The bar is set really low for women leaders so when they run for or are in a leader position everybody makes a big deal out of it (i.e. Hilary Clinton for President). While yes it is great having females in leadership position but it is hard for women since the bar is so low because no one thinks they will make it. Then some people think that women should be leaders and especially black women. Gwen talked about an experience she had with an individual in her office when she work at a newspaper. Someone left a disturbing, racist note on her desk, I’ll leave out the details of the note but in a nut shell it said she didn’t belong there and needed to get out. Gwen said that the when she saw the note her first thought was who is this note for. Then when she took the note to her boss and the person responsibly was not disciplined. Gwen was offered another job. I enjoyed this story because of how Gwen acted in the situation. She did not get angry publicly. She just shrugged it off and continued with her career. After Gwen’s lecture I am going to give women of leadership roles more respect and treat them as a human not just as the sex, race, and etc.

In class on Tuesday we had a work day for our digital story telling project. We had some great ideas thrown around and I am excited to get filming. I am glad the video I found was useful to our project. Although massively inappropriate for our class and the video we want to make. This idea seemed too good to pass up, so I apologize if anyone was offended by this video. I also like the GTL idea with Cy so kudos to whoever thought of that. One other thing, that I don’t think got overlook was something Beth had brought up having the freshmen be able to choose three different genres to work with. I personally think that it is a good idea because finding song from one genre and one genre alone will be extremely difficult.