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My experience with JOUR 4250

I took this class because I needed an elective credit for my public relations degree. I’ll admit to being a little reproachful when I first signed up; I was worried that diversity and inclusion weren’t topics I was qualified to speak on as a straight, white male. That feeling was exactly why I took the course. I figured that it was better to learn how to talk about these issues when they arose, rather than stay quiet in fear that I would say something wrong, or offend someone. Professor Bland’s class has given me the confidence to participate in conversations about “touchy” subjects like diversity, inclusion, and representation. Though I’ll never be an expert, I really enjoyed the opportunity to take a few steps in the right direction. 

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My experience with Billboard.com

My team worked conducted a content analysis on billboard.com for our final project. We opted to analyze Billboard’s news section by splitting its categories into three equal parts. I was assigned the rock, k-pop, pop, and style sections of the site. I scoured each of my sections for race and gender representation among articles, including their subjects, sources, and writers. I was a little surprised to find that a majority of Billboard’s writers are white, and many are male (at least among the four sections I covered). This doesn’t align with my expectations because I assumed a site like Billboard would have more diverse staffing and article topics. My group members and I have yet to compile all of our data though, so maybe the full results will tell a different story. 

Either way, I’ve enjoyed this project. Though it was a lot of work, auditing a news source for their diversity and inclusion gave me a new perspective on its content and structure. I found myself paying more attention than I was before. 

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Native American Representation

In our (thankfully) shortened class, the presenting team touched on how Native Americans are represented in the media. Though we didn’t have a full class that day, everyone who answered (beyond the group presenting) seemed to be equally stumped on coming up with an answer that *wasn’t* an example of tribal Native American lifestyles. It really brought the cultural erasure Native Americans have experienced after colonization to the forefront. I’ve decided to take some of the team’s movie recommendations to heart and check out positive portrayals of Native Americans in film, as a start. 

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Confessions of a Video Vixen

Though it’s been a few classes since then, I’ve still got the Confessions of a Video Vixen documentary we watched is still on my mind. When the book was published in 2005, I was nine years old and the furthest from a hip-hop fan I could be. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to listen to more and more hip-hop from that era, and before I watched the video I had a slightly romanticized view of the early 2000′s. When I saw what the women in the video were forced to do for a shot at fame, that romantic view was definitely squashed. Hearing Steffans’ and other women’s accounts of sexual harassment, and the way they were coerced into offering sex for career advancement, is especially gross to me. 

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Representation in superhero media

Group 5′s presentation on race and gender roles in superhero fiction was really interesting to me. I’ve only caught a few of the big Marvel movies, so the trend has honestly passed me by for the most part. However, even I was able to keep up and follow along with the points Group 5 made, especially those talking about how female superheroes often have their mental abilities or their agility played up, while male superheroes are often celebrated for their physical strength and prowess. The “training to be ____’s wife” t-shirts were also particularly gross to me, and I was glad Group 5 shed some light on them.  Also, hearing Group 5 discuss the financial impact Black Panther had was really heartwarming. I feel that Hollywood (and other entertainment industry) executives are scared to take chances on things that aren’t “safe”, for many of them that seems to include movies written by Black people. Having hard numbers to show these executives makes me hopeful we can see more fantastic movies that explore stories that aren’t just written for and by white people. 

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Sexuality in video games

Last class, my group (group six) presented on race and gender representation in video games. The book didn’t give us much to work with, so many of our examples came from either research or our own experiences with the medium. My team presented well, in my opinion, and I was especially impressed with Claire’s section on gender. She put in a lot of work, and it showed.  In this blog, I’d actually like to touch on something she mentioned in her part of the presentation: sexualized female characters. Sexuality is a hot-button topic as is, but in video games women were (and unfortunately, often still are) reduced merely to sex objects. One character that Claire mentioned, Bayonetta, is presented as an almost entirely sexual being in almost every scene of the game. However, there are arguments surrounding Bayonetta in particular, namely that she is a powerful, confident woman who is frequently portrayed as the strongest character on-screen, and that her sexuality is simply an aspect of her character.

When I think about this, I always stumble over the same question: do sex and sexuality have a place in video games? Though the medium is often thought of a children’s pass-time, the audience (namely, our generation and the one before us) is growing older and more mature, and the plot-lines of the video games they are playing is growing with them. As a man, I don’t really feel qualified to give a definitive answer on the topic, but I would love to hear from people who know better than I on this. 

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2/27 class: Kevin Hart and Image Repair

In class on the 27th, we talked about how Kevin Hart’s controversy surrounding old jokes turned into a real pain point for his image. I actually had a similar conversation with some friends just a few days ago (over a week after the class), and found that their opinions were actually surprisingly different from my own. For me, the content of jokes wasn’t part of the issue; I had already decided that joking about spanking your child because they were gay was universally thought of as poor taste and that Kevin’s controversy came from the fact that he refused to apologize.  For them, the conversation was about whether he had to apologize for his jokes, and whether they were funny. We found ourselves split on both issues, two of the four of us on each side. It was interesting to me that, in the relatively newer groups of friends I’ve made here at school (and away from my hometown), there’s near-universal agreement that Kevin’s jokes were in poor taste. The topic doesn’t even come up; everyone is talking about when or how he should apologize, rather than debating whether if they were funny in the first place. 

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2/22 blog

This week, Professor Bland asked us to look at media targeting people outside of our in-group. I chose a magazine targeted at African American people titled (appropriately) Black Texas Magazine. The content is primarily focused on events or topics relating to life in Texas’s urban centers from a black perspective. These include stories about Austin’s Northside Mall’s insensitivity, hair-care promotion, and a recent focus on fashion following Austin’s Fashion Week 2018 last April.  I chose this publication because it’s speaking about topics that are pretty far outside of my in-group. My ability to relate to racial experiences is not nearly as strong as my ability to relate to other genders, so I wanted to challenge my understanding and potential biases. I’m pleased to report quite a bit of common ground between my own interests and the topics presented in the magazine. 

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Women’s representation in media

As a child, I was privileged to see myself in every piece of media I touched. Anywhere I looked I could find a thin, white boy with brown hair. The stories my media told reflected me and my burgeoning values. I almost never had to consider what life was like for people who were different from me, including race, class, and especially gender. But as a child, I could relate to other boys, even if they had a different background than I did. But girls? No way. Icky. You wouldn’t catch me (or any other boy I knew) dead trying to hang out with a girl. Even as we all grew older and girls went from alien creatures to alien creatures we maybe wanted to kiss, the idea of boys and girls being friends was baffling.  As an adult, I see this same phenomenon in my media. I grew out of the boy’s only club, but Hollywood and other media are still stuck in the past. “Miss Representation” showed the struggle women face for complete, accurate, and real representation in the media, and how that lack of representation can contribute to the bonds and limitations imposed on them by our patriarchal society. As Professor Bland said in class, women make up 51 percent of our population. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to tell if you looked at our media.

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Microaggressions

This past week’s class, we discussed microaggressions with Teresita and Shani from the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity. The topic wasn’t something entirely unfamiliar to me, I definitely learned a lot from their presentation. One thing that stuck out to me was the way some widely used words in the English language are rooted in racial insensitivities. For example, I was recently informed that the phrase “gipped” is actually in reference to the word “gypsy,” now considered a slur by a portion of the Romani people. Similarly, calling something “lame” has a similar context, as it implies the object of the insult is handicapped or disabled. In my mind, those were just phrases that I had heard on television as a child. I used them, but not frequently; they were just a part of my vernacular. Now, however, I’ll stay far away from those and other, similar phrases. Though neither are as “bad” or offensive as, for example, a racial slur, their origins could make them painful or upsetting to hear to some. In my mind, a communicator has a duty to spare someone’s feelings whenever possible. After all, even the SPJ Code of Ethics asks its members to minimize harm. If an investigative journalist can do it, I see no reason why I can’t. 

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Different, but similar

During our first class, we were put into the teams we will work with for the rest of the semester. I was shocked at how truly diverse my group wound up being: two of our members are members of the LGBTQ+ community, one of our members is not from the United States, and three of our members are male, while the other three are female. Even in a class about diversity, this was refreshing. 

I mention this because of the variety of perspectives such a diverse group provides. I’m a straight, white male, and the way I view the world is filtered through my identity. As such, some aspects of other cultures or lifestyles are lost on me because I’m unable to experience them. For example, I don’t really know what it’s like to be a lesbian living in the Bible Belt, even though I lived with my mother and her lesbian partner for multiple years. I watched them experience a variety of things based on their sexuality, both good and bad, and these metaphorical front-row seats have done much to show me how valuable and enriching learning from different, diverse people and viewpoints can be. 

However, as much as learning from others benefits me, I don’t want to reduce them to stepping stones on my way to a greater understanding. I would like to not just be enriched, but enrich others as well. I hope this class can help me improve on that aspect of myself. 

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Journalism blog

This is my blog for JOUR 4250!