I am a huge music person, so evaluating the history of music, especially its political significance has been very enlightening. As said in the podcast, music has been utilized to convey political messages for hundreds of years, most notably, for me is during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was an extremely unpopular war and it generated a very high level of discontent among young people, translating into protests. Artists channeled this frustration and anger towards the government into songwriting, and I think that’s a very powerful tool. Still, music continues to be a very powerful source to convey important messages. Beyonce and Childish Gambino are some of the most influential and important artists of our generation  therefore, their position as leaders makes their messages that more influential. Both singers utilize their platforms to call attention to social issues, specifically racism and police brutality. The music videos for “Formation” and “This is America” are still as impactful as the first time I watched them, illustrating their power as symbolic activism through music.

This weeks podcast and reading introduced an interesting consideration concerning women’s place in society. I read the Yellow Wallpaper my Junior year of high school; however, looking at it through a sense of domesticity provides a new perspective. As stated in the podcast, there is no such thing as just entertainment–all entertainment conveys a lesson, no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant. The Yellow Wallpaper, however, has an obvious lesson concerning women being trapped in the empty role of domesticity. In the 19th century, women were expected to act as domestic angels, whose main goal was to preserve the home and care for their children. Even as middle and lower class entered the workforce, women were still expected to care for the domestic sphere in their home, adding a layer of uncompensated invisible labor.

In her narrative, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writes the story of a woman who feels trapped in the confines of her husbands grasps and her expected role as a domestic wife, while also battling “nervous depression”. As part of her treatment, she is forbidden from intellectual working of any kind, even writing–essentially, she must lie in bed all day. To fight her boredom, the woman secretly writes in her journal to rely her thoughts and keep her from experiencing a depressive episode. However, her life of boredom and basically imprisonment cause her to hallucinate a trapped woman behind the yellow wallpaper in her room. The trapped woman symbolizes herself and Gilman’s “fictional” character is a depiction of herself. Women’s roles in life being so tunneled into being wives and mothers created a feeling of frustration that can cause women to experience insanity, understandingly so. Such gender roles continue today and have been exasperated by the pandemic, as women perform the vast majority of domestic work in all homes. The narrative of women as ‘expected’ to perform the domestic work creates a cycle of implicit biases of sexism. Gender roles, which have been dramatically challenged in the past years, are still drilled into our society and our expectations of women; therefore, years of implicit bias reckoning must occur to tear down the pervasive misogyny.

Today’s podcast focused on leadership and pop culture, specifically how the two are interconnected. Culture is technically separated into two brackets: high and low. High culture is what we consider intellectual–art, the symphony, poetry. Low culture is considered  popular culture, like the music we currently listen to (hip hop, pop) and the movies we watch. Regardless, of the terminology all high culture was once low culture, as told in the podcast–Shakespeare, in his time, was considered a vulgar playwright, who presented his work to the masses. Today, Shakespeare is grouped as a member of high culture as an astounding playwright, but in his era he embodied the day’s pop culture. In essence, all pop culture is a form of storytelling which is at the core of leadership. Robin Hood, a caricature of the Middle Ages prompted real change and uproar within his community, inspiring workers to revolt against their landlords due to their awful living conditions and wages. Robin Hood embodies the power pop culture can have on a community. Presently, much of pop culture is not so much  found in books, but rather in movies. Because movies are such an integral aspect of our society, they work to normalize behavior, making representation along gender and racial lines extremely important. For example, Black Panther has the highest gross of a single hero movie in Marvel, garnering huge success around the country and inspiring social movements. “Wakanda Forever” became a regular chant seen at Black Lives Matter marches, illustrating the vast effects a movie can have on a population. Pop culture is at the essence of our everyday behavior; therefore, we must focus on a culture that represents and listens to all members of society.

The village simulator game was extremely frustrating, mostly because I perform very poorly in video games. Throughout the hour long endeavor, I was so confused and consistently disappointed. For some unknown reason, the ‘help’ button and the tutorial video were unavailable, so it became a guessing game. And that guessing game did not go well. Coupled with my lack of agricultural/fishing knowledge, I did not know how much or what to invest in. First off, the work days for Kodjo and Fatou were initially 12 hours a day, and exceedingly cruel and inhumane work day–especially for two teenagers. Their health began dramatically declining due to such tough conditions and lack of nutrients, but because money needed to made I only lowered their work days to 10 hours, still an absurd amount of hours to spend on hard labor. Both kids had only completed 6 years of schooling and were unable to spend more years in school because of immediate financial need. When one’s entire income depends on agriculture, fishing, and small business endeavors, the wages one earns are very volatile depending on the season, and usually very low. I repeatedly took out loans because I needed money to buy more supplies in order to increase my yield of crops, but it only resulted in increased debt. This just felt like a consistent losing game, and even though it’s a “game,” the village simulator depicts everyday life for many people across the globe. The lack of resources and monetary capital is breathtakingly tragic, and puts one’s life in perspective. The thought of completing maybe a 6th grade education and then spending the rest of ones life in a never-ending cycle of property, highlights the severe inequalities in our country. It makes me think how in the world BILLIONAIRES exist when millions of human beings live in such grueling and horrible conditions–the level of inequality is truly disgusting.

My favorite commercial is the 2012 One Direction commercial for Pepsi during the Super Bowl. I am the perfect target audience as I was at the time and still am a huge One Direction fan. The ad shows the band share a Pepsi with football player Drew Brees, branching together two very different demographics of people. I love the branching together of teenage girls and football fans into one commercial–it’s a rare occurrence. It makes me a one direction fan, want to drink a Pepsi with a Drew Brees fan/ other football fans. Pepi has a habit of contracting celebrities for their commercials to show that celebrities drink our soda so you should too. I never want to drink Pepsi, but this ad makes me crave a cold Pepsi, so I guess Pepsi has accomplished their goal. Also, this ad has over 3 million views on YouTube, showing the power of including celebrities in ones advertisements.

I found this chart very interesting, as it asks people from different countries what percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. The results are very interesting as there is a huge overestimate, leading with Mexico who assumed 29% of the CEOs to be women, when in reality only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. This chart provides ample information, especially by outlining the question asked and the percentages asked. However, it does not list how many people participated in this survey per country, it only presents the overall number as n=19,428, making me believe the information may be skewed. Like noted in the podcast, statistical charts will purposefully exclude information to present skewed or biased information. Also, it would be beneficial to note the demographics of people asked: racially, socioeconomically, and age–all, which can provide very different results. Additionally, we do not know how the respondents were contacted, so that could have an effect on the results. Ultimately, I thought it was interesting that people all over the world overestimated the percentage of women as CEOs, but the reliability of the chart is questionable.

Freedmen and Ryland were segregationists who actively advocated for slavery and Ryland even owned slaves–why are these names proudly displayed at our university? The University, more specifically the board of trustees, has expressed their desire to keep these names displayed, while making additions to the names. First off, these so called additions to the buildings are, in my opinion, extremely tone deaf to the situation. How is it okay for Freedmen’s name to proudly sit alongside Mitchell. Mitchell was a prominent black journalist in Richmond who actively advocated against white supremacy , while Freedmen was an active advocate of segregation and eugenics–how is it okay to place these names side by side. To me, it is very offensive and unjust to place these two names side-by-side.  The case is similar to Ryland, who was also a racist and actually owned enslaved people. The decision was to keep Rylands name on the building while naming a small terrace on the building after one of the people he enslaved. This is a really bad decision, not only is the power dynamic very visible, but Ryland was the enslaver to this person–while he is glorified, and they have a little terrace named after them. It just seems very patronizing and wrong.

Ultimately, I believe these names should be replaced with people who also contributed to the University or the greater Richmond community, instead of visibly glorifying people which held and committed such immoral actions. The argument is similar to the removal of confederate monuments, removing monuments does not erase the history, but rather they should not be glorified as heroes, when they were morally bad human beings. The same argument goes for the buildings renaming, let’s replace the names with individuals who were positive, progressive advocates of the University, instead of continuing the display of the university’s racist past.

Hidalgo’s article, “The Duty to Disobey Immigration Law,” was a very interesting read, which provided a viewpoint uncommon for American ideology. A focus of American culture is trust in the justice system and the sanity of laws, especially regarding obedience–but, the article focuses on a guiding factor even more important than the law, morality. Hidalgo argues the moral responsibility to disobey immoral immigration laws, as it is more important to follow moral values rather than an unjust law. Additionally, he focuses on the unconstitutionality of immigration laws, describing the violation of individual liberties/freedoms. In his argument concerning the unconstitutionality of these laws he ironically utilizes the justice system  to his advantage. This article highlights the problem of authority, although we are taught to follow the leader/authority figure, they are not always correct, and when they act unjustly one must disobey. The guiding factor in these situations should be ethics and, in this case, the violation of rights of immigrants. However, the argument becomes difficult with different assumptions of the law/morality.

I, personally, agree with most of Hidalgo’s view points, as the prosecution and treatment of  of undocumented immigrants is completely immoral and unconstitutional and must be rejected despite the written law. However, in Dr. Bezio’s podcast, the formation of assumptions is explained, especially about our assumptions concerning  culturally/racially different people. Donald Trump and other republicans fomented the assumption of undocumented immigrants as criminals, dangerous, and rapists, convincing their followers to believe the same, when the statistics clearly point to the contrary. These assumptions are based in morality, it is seen as immoral to allow undocumented immigrants in the country because they are “predators” so they need to protect their community. Additionally, they argue the stance of law and order to respect the laws in place because they are just. These ideas, which I strongly disagree with, are based on the same principle as Hidalgo’s argument. It is interesting to note the different, polarizing ways in which both morality and lawfulness can be implemented to argue opposite viewpoints–this is the power of our assumptions.

The podcast was a very interesting listen, as it really highlighted the problems of bias and stereotypes in our lives. As said in the podcast, biases are very dangerous and negative for a group of people, especially minorities. Because American culture has historically been centered around white culture, other groups are constantly excluded from the “classic” American. Especially harmful are the stereotypes present in Hollywood–white, blonde, blue-eyed individuals are the common archetype for heroes in movies. Like stated in the podcast, movies hyper-focus on negative minority stereotypes to extenuate in their narratives. Although a shift is beginning through more representation of POCs in the media, there is still much progress to be made.

As a Colombian-American, most of the representation I see in films is centered around drugs and Colombians as drug dealers. Not only is this stereotype negative and offensive, but it perpetuates judgement about ALL Colombians. The same type of judgement is common for other minority groups. American culture is made up of all groups, not only white people, after all the US is a country of immigrants, so all Americans deserve and are entitled to representation in the media.

For the Implicit bias test, I took the coronavirus assessment. I was definitely surprised by my results, as it stated I has an equal implicit bias between describing coronavirus as dangerous and harmless. I clearly do not view coronavirus as harmless; therefore, I thought it was interesting how this test determined my results. For one of the sections of the quiz, I found the set up very confusing, so that may have skewed my results. However, the list of questions were very interesting and caused me to think deeply about myself and my own perceptions. Essentially, I still question if the quiz determined my own ideas about covid concerning myself or for the overall population. For me, since I am a young and healthy person I am not too scared of my personal health if I were to contract the virus. However, I definitely worry for older populations and those at risks, so I take precautions very seriously. If the aim of the test was to assess the effects of covid on myself, then I would believe this to be a fair assessment; but, this is not fair for my beliefs about the effects of covid for the general population.