Leadership and the Humanities Class Blog Posts

I really enjoyed pure confidence. The premise is there is a slave who is also the best horse jockey rider in the south and he wants to become a free man. I thought that this play was really informing and overall I had a good time. I thought that this interpretation of what it was like in the south during the civil war with people who didn’t support slavery. I also thought it was interesting how the play made the northerner people out to be the bad guys and how they were more racist than some people in the south. I thought that that was really political and I was surprised but the play portrayed the southerners to be more supportive of the cause. I think this play has very interesting messages about the south and the north during this time period and how no one wasn’t racist.

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In October, I attended the College Democrats and College Republicans debate. Two students debated on the Democrats side and two students debated for the Republicans side with a Moderator asking questions and making sure the debate did not get out of hand or anything. The debate focused on various policy issues which are very relevant in politics right now especially with the race for the 2020 Democratic nominee to take on Donald Trump in November. There were three main policy issues which the debaters focused on: namely gun violence, immigration and the environment. Though the debaters disagreed significantly on all of these issues, they all managed to remain civil and intellectual when addressing the other representatives. The issues which were chosen are each prominent issues which are complex and difficult to untangle or argue. Both sides represented the prominent arguments of the actual Democrat and Republican parties, which become difficult to argue against as they become strengthened into each party and cemented into each member of the respective party.

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The Last Lecture series gives faculty at the University of Richmond the opportunity to speak on a topic as if it was the last lecture they would ever give. I listened to Dr. Laura Knouse, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Richmond, give her “last” lecture entitled “Being Human is Hard.” Dr. Knouse’s points really opened my mind. She talks about how being a human in today’s society is harder than it has ever been because of modern technology. Dr. Knouse explained that we should be able to make ourselves happy all the time with access to much information. This is not the case, though. I have never lived in a time where information was not available in the blink of an eye, and Dr. Knouse’s talk pointed out problems that I didn’t even know I had simply because I have never experienced anything else.

Dr. Knouse then moved on to talk about a more personal topic. Her son was diagnosed with autism, and this was one of her greatest fears while she was pregnant with him. She struggled with the idea that she would not be able to connect with her son. She said that “giving others a window on your own authentic struggle, your vulnerability, is one experience that can free others to choose a vital life for themselves.” Basically, Dr. Knouse suggests that by being open with your struggles, you can help somebody with your own. It is ok to be vulnerable and accept imperfection.

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“Digital Dystopias” was a speaking by Yasha Levin about the internet. He started the speaking by showing a video about the internet from when it first became a thing and how they displayed it as a wonderful, happy thing. However, people now are afraid of the internet especially in politics as it is believed that the internet has been turned into a weapon.

I liked this speaking because it provided quick history of how the internet came to be and how peoples views of it developed as the internet did.

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“Pure Confidence” is a play that I went to most recently and took place at a time where slavery was prevalent. The play mainly revolved around the main character Simon, who is a horse racing jockey that is hired to race for money for his owner. As the play continues, Simon is able to become free from being a slave.

I think that this play intertwined well with this class as it displayed domination and subordination. Simon was a subordinate to his dominant owner. Despite his determined and intelligent persona, Simon was unable to free himself from slavery on his own. Labeling him a subordinate. Overall, I enjoyed watching this play and seeing its relations to readings in class.

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Appropriate was a play I was able to see earlier this fall and I found it very interesting. It is about a family uncovering the past of their deceased father while visiting their old childhood home. After finding a disturbing photo album, they find out that their father was an advocate for the Klu Klux Klan.

This play was filled with a lot of hatred and anger towards each of the characters as well as the deceased father. I think that it was interesting to see who stayed loyal to their father based off of the type of relationship that they had as children. One character defended and denied her father and tried to convince others that there was no possibility of the photo album being his. However, the other two characters were appalled at the fact that their father would support such a terrible thing. But that just goes to show how each character got along with their father.

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This article furthered my knowledge of the media and how it has effects people. The beginning of the reading talked about how Donald Trump tweeted the press was “the enemy of the American people.” The media is very powerful and this example shows the impact that social media has. Social media impacts people’s viewpoints more than it ever has before in pst. In recent years people are very much influenced by social media.

Archer then talks about fake news and how it is very difficult to know if it is fake or not. This is because it is hard to understand or know what is true. The internet and social media can be dangerous in how people can manipulate certain information.

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I went to the speaker on 11/19 about the internet. I found it interesting in the beginning he talked about how families are hesitant to let their children use the internet due to its problems. He explained how some families believe that the internet is hijacked. He explained how the internet is a weapon for some people. Another interesting fact he said was that 7/10 of the world’s richest men came from the tech industry. This does not surprise me but still, I found it interesting. He then talked about how different programs came about. He said there was a new program that developed that allows the pentagon to put in data and work with data that they have not been able to do before. The program is a mixture of Excel and a database. I liked hearing this presentation because it was very cool to see how much the internet has changed but also how people view it today.

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The play “Pure Confidence” relates directly to the topic of dominants and subordinates that we covered in class. The permanent in equality in this performance was between white slave owners and black slaves. The dynamic between the dominant and subordinate did not exactly line up with Miller’s view, though. Miller claimed that once a dominant was established, the subordinate was labelled as defective. In “Pure Confidence,”the slave had an outstanding talent of jockeying, and this talent was a large part of both the slave and the slave owner’s identity. However, the play did have some parallels with the Miller reading. Miller also claimed that when subordinates develop characteristics such as competency or intelligence, there is no way for them to apply them in a productive way. For example, Simon Cato, the male slave, makes enough money to buy his own horse, which he hopes will make him enough money to buy himself out of slavery. Even though Cato is proactive in his attempt to free himself, his slave owner makes his price impossible to pay, thus proving that he cannot apply his intelligence in a productive way.

Another theme that is present in both Miller’s work and in “Pure Confidence” is that subordinates often know more about dominants than vice versa. At the beginning of the play, Cato is able to manipulate the slave owners by striking deals and racing for different white men. His knowledge of the behavior of the white men allows him to maximize his profit to get what he wants.

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I went to Michele Norris’s talk about her initiative called the Race Card Project on November 8^th. Before opening up a question and answer session, Norris explained the main ideas behind her work. She asks people to write a six-word sentence on a notecard about their personal perspective on race in America. She shared several of the cards she has received, and many of them were moving. One, in particular, stuck with me: “There are no categories besides humans.” I think these six words embody the Race Card Project at its root; at the end of the day, if everyone saw each other as equals, race would not be such a taboo in this country.

Norris mentioned how college campuses are often the most diverse environments we experience in our lives because as we get older, we move into more concentric circles. This is definitely something I am going to keep in mind as I continue the next four years here.

Finally, the most meaningful part of the presentation was seeing how listeners interpreted Norris’s words during the question and answer section. One student asked Norris if it is possible to move forward without addressing the past. Norris responded without hesitation. She said trying to move on without addressing the past would be like driving without looking in the rearview mirror. Trying to shove our country’s ugly past under the rug will not improve anything. Norris added on to her analogy by pointing out that the objects in rearview mirror are also closer than they appear, meaning that the system-imposed racism in our country is more recent than it feels. She specifically brought up Jim Crow legislation, and that even though it is no longer in place, you cannot legislate what is in someone’s heart.

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Pure Confidence was another play I attended that was produced by the university’s theater department. This play was very good. It was about slavery and racial tensions that still exist today. The character that I really enjoyed watching was Simon. He was a slave and would ride horses in races for his owner. He did this to make money for his owner. I especially liked Simon because he was very rebellious in the way he did not want to be a slave and wanted to be free. To do so, he had to buy himself from his owner. I liked how passionate he was and when he put his mind to something, he did it.

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I attended the play, Appropriate which was performed by the university’s theater department. The play was about three kids going to their father’s house with their children after their father has passed away. There was much tension all through the house as the siblings have not been in close contact over the years. Then one of the siblings finds a book that has pictures of the remains of black men.

All of the siblings are startled as they had no idea that their father was a supporter of the Klu Klux Klan. They are very upset and some are reluctant to think that their father would be part of such a group. They all have no idea what they should do with the book as they do not want their own children to see it. This play was very good and interesting in the way it explained what the different generations believed in or were apart of.

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I attended the event hosted by Spiders Against Sexual Assault and Violence (SASAV) on Monday, November 18th. They were hosting a film screen “The Hunting Ground”. The movie “The Hunting Ground” is a documentary exposing the underlying sexual assault culture on college campuses across the country, along with the institutional cover-ups and the social retaliation that followed.  The documentary begins by giving the stories of sexual assault and rape survivors and the different ways they were able to cope. It then delves into the reporting process and the administrative side of the issue.  One of the interviewed administrators said that they purposefully made the process difficult, so they do not have as many reports and to “artificially keep their numbers low”. Another discussed how the top priority of the school was to protect its reputation and the protecting the students was second. Many of the schools did not properly punish those convicted of the offense by only giving them a warning or a $25 fine. One example given was Stanford University and from 1996-2013, there was a total of 259 reports of assaults and only 1 expulsion during this time. This is one of the primary reasons why survivors feel as though reporting will not help their cause. They also frequently suffer from victim blaming as they are accused of wearing something revealing, drinking too much, asking for it, and not saying no enough times. Sadly, sexual violence has become a part of the college culture, from fraternities to sports, as 1 in 4 girls experiences this. As a society, we need to do better to address these issues and work to fix them. The problem not only lies with the perpetrators but also with the universities’ administrations who refused to acknowledge and properly hold the assaulters responsible.

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I went to hear a Jepson Alumni, Sean Theriault speak about congress and how it has changed over the years. He is a political science professor at the University of Texas. He spoke about two main points. He talked about the difference in how senators have been voting over the past few years as well as which senators are most likely to vote along party lines.

He showed a graph that shows how a decline in bipartisanship and an increase in grid locks. He talks about a rise in senators that vote for their party in order to get votes to get into the Congress. There has been a rise in outrages politicians because of the political climate. People are upset with the government so they vote in people that they believe will bring about change. However, these radical politicians actually make it harder to bring about change.

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Performed by University of Richmond’s very own theatre department, Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkin was an extremely thought-provoking play. The play chronicles three children arriving at their father’s plantation home in Arkansas with their own children following his death. The siblings have clearly fallen out of contact with one another and old tensions are immediately brought back to the surface. However, those tensions fall to the wayside as a much bigger one appears: the discovery of photos of lynchings and the remains of a black person.

Not knowing what to believe and not wanting to confront the harsh reality that their father was a member of or at the very least a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, the struggles the siblings face can be easily seen as a metaphor for the United States today. It is easy to forget that we are only two generations removed from the height of the KKK, Jim Crow, and blatant acts of racially-motivated hate. Many of us want to believe that we as a country have moved past those days, but when confronted with the reality that people we know or are connected to may have contributed to that problem we often shut down or go into denial. This play reinforces the need for a continued dialogue about race in our country today. We’ve made progress in many ways, but just because lynchings aren’t commonplace in today’s world doesn’t mean we’ve solved the problem.

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On November 12, 2019, Peabody Award-winning journalist, NPR host, and author of The Grace of Silence Michele Norris came to the University of Richmond to discuss The Race Card Project. Founded by Norris in 2010, she has turned a flippant phrase into a meaningful discussion about race. Not expecting really anyone to respond, Norris began the project while on a book tour for her memoir The Grace of Silence. At different stops on the tour, Norris and her team left postcards that asked the responders to write six words about their experience, perception, questions, observations, or any thoughts they had on race. Soon, Norris began getting postcards from states she hadn’t even toured and realized she might have found a mechanism for facilitating a conversation our country so desperately needs.

Since the project’s conception, Norris has received over 500,000 postcards, both physical and online, and has a team dedicated just to archiving the postcards. I was personally fascinated not only by the responses she shared but specifically by the decision to limit the responses to just six words. Norris explained her thought process, saying that if she asked people to write an essay or a paragraph she thought they’d never respond because they would think it’s too much work but if she asked for a sentence responders would try to pass off an essay as a sentence. Norris concluded that she would need to make it very specific and with five words being deemed not long enough, she settled on six. Her approach clearly is working as more people than I would have ever expected have responded, taking time out of their days to contribute to a meaningful conversation about race. It gives me hope that the United States is moving towards a place where we can have these difficult conversations on such a large scale in person and in more than six words.

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On October 24, 2019, Dr. Camilla Nonterah from the Department of Psychology gave a talk entitled “How Our World Shapes Our Health”. Dr. Nonterah began by outlining how humans have conceptualized health throughout history. Evolving from a belief in good and evil spirits and sorcery in the prehistoric period, today in the 21st Century we have a multifactorial biomedical and psychosomatic model. This idea of a multifactorial model is echoed by the World Health Organization’s proclamation that “the context of people’s lives determine their health”. This references social determinants of health, which are non-medical factors that affect one’s health and what Dr. Nonterah focused her talk on.

While this concept was not surprising to me as studies have shown how detrimental stress is to the body and how circumstances an individual often cannot control like their genetics, social status, and access to healthcare are all non-medical factors that affect a person’s health. However, Dr. Nonterah raised some other social determinants of health that I hadn’t previously considered, like race-related stress. Studies show how race-related stress negatively impacts health in a variety of ways. For example, early racial discrimination is associated with depressive symptoms and accelerates the aging process. Racial discrimination is also indirectly associated with alcoholism. Another surprising statistic showed that internalized racism is associated with a higher BMI. After discussing other social determinants of health, Dr. Nonterah emphasized the importance of a broader understanding of the effect policies have on health and a deeper understanding of biological pathways. This talk reinforced how complex and multidimensional health is and that you can’t always determine a person’s health just from looking at them.

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Williamson article discusses the evolving aspects of leaders in the 21st century. In the professional world, things and ideas are rapidly changing and improving. Williamson provided six themes of leadership. The first one I found interesting which was “Leadership is no longer the exclusive domain of the ‘boss at the top’. This idea that anybody can lead from within a group is a core feature of a democracy.

I think the most important aspect that Williamson covers is that a leader must bring out the best in everyone. As a leader if if your followers do not feel a sense of self worth then nothing else really matters. In theory you can be an effective but demeaning leader. However, the most effective leaders that Williamson discusses exerts some form of effort to ensure that their followers feel valued.

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COLLOQUIUM: Through an Indigenous Lens

I attended this panel for my Art History class. The panel took place in the Robins School of Business, Ukrop Auditorium. The panel was made up of three filmmakers- Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil and was moderated by to UR members. Going into this talk I did not know what to expect; growing up in the northeast with an uncle who has committed his life to working with Native American communities in the United States and Canada I am very aware of not only their hardships of the past but the lasting and further forced struggles and mistreatment these communities face today. 

I am very interested in film and see it as a tool for change but I am aware of the negative, misinformed ripples it can cause. The three Contemporary Indigenous filmmakers and curators explained the harm and misconceptions media and photos have brought to their communities. This was very interesting and something I was very unaware of. They shared their own works and explained that while the widespread media about indigenous people puts them in a box, limited their people to solely who they were in the past. However, unlike the US Government’s beloved untouchable Constitution, the indigenous people’s practice and social practices are always evolving. This is not what it publicized or taught in schools- limiting the general public to the past practices of the indigenous people is very harmful to their image and carries a large misconception about who they are in present-day which leads these communities to be further oppressed and neglected. This panel was eye-opening. 

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Free the Facts

Free the Facts came to present to UR students on a rainy Tuesday, October 29th, to present a policy seminar on Social Security. I first learned about the Free the Facts presentation when a student ambassador came to WCGA to teach us about what the organization was, their goals, and to ask for our support. They shared that a goal of the presentation was to empower us, our generation, by educating us on the facts and complexity of the United States’ fiscal policy issues. Free the Facts is a nonpartisan organization trying to give students info we need to make informed decisions about the biggest issues facing our generations. They especially emphasized one of their slogans “getting America’s brightest minds on our biggest problems” as they especially focused on the “biggest problems with the biggest price tags. They spoke about the facts behind social security insolvency, the inability to pay one’s debts. While some of the information they shared was over my head, it was clear that this issue needs the attention of our and all generations and attending the presentation made me feel more informed and motivated me to do some personal Social Security research of my own. I was personally drawn to this talk because social security and how it works has never been very clear to me but I knew I wanted to understand it now, early on, both to make informed decisions about my own future AND IN THE POLLS. They mentioned that they also present on student loans, Medicare, and pensions… I would like to see them again.

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