Leadership and the Humanities Class Blog Posts

I find the idea of in groups and out groups very interesting. I think people often think about the groups they identify with a lot, but don’t think as much about the groups they don’t identify with and why. I also think it was interesting how the in groups identifies them selves and their means of doing so. It’s important to look at the common things a group has and what forms each group. Also why the groups form.

I think that this can be applied to large scale and small scale groups. Whether it be a certain friend group to a whole racial group. I think it’s important we understand the types of groups we are in as well as other people to try and understand our own and others identities.

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Digital Dystopian Event 

Susan Nevin 

The speaker for this event was Yasha Levine, who was born in the Soviet Union, and escaped to the United States as political refugees, and came to live in San Francisco. He then became an investigative reporter, and has been researching the internet as a weapon. Levine claims that the Internet started as something new and magical. However, the sheen is wearing off and people are becoming afraid and paranoid of the internet. People are convinced that the internet has been hijacked and is now used as a weapon of meddling, and is not what it was before. Additionally, some people think that the internet is what caused Trump’s election. 

Levine also argued that never before in the history of mankind had the internet been used to convince people of things in the way it did in 2016. The internet is not an innocent technology. The Internet has been used for surveillance and propaganda for years. Fear after the 2016 election was based on the idea that the internet was never used for a weapon. People are now seeing how the internet is giving dominance to monopolies and people are making money selling things to us. Altogether, we just saw the internet in the wrong light, and Levine is shining a spotlight on it.

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This past Sunday I attended the Global Sounds concert in Modlin. The name is pretty broad so I did not know what to expect at all. During the concert there were students that played all sorts of different drums. A long with them were some adults who seemed to know what they were doing a little more. In some of the songs they did chants that reminded me of a cult and there was some audience participation such as clapping. It was definitely not what I expected because I did not think that it would be students and did not know that drums would be involved.

Overall, I did not really like the concert. I do not enjoy live music concerts too much anyways, and especially not really loud drums. While I know that they were students and did not practice a lot, they were not great at drumming. However, I do respect their bravery to go up in front of a crowd and do something that is not their craft. There were a good amount of people in the crowd and I am pretty sure that the students got some sort of extra credit in their class if they had a few friends come. This was an interesting experience but definitely not something I’m in a rush to go back to.

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I attended the talk sponsored by Jepson “The Internet as a Weapon” by Yasha Levine. The overall premise of this talk was very interesting, and I was excited for it. Levine started with a video from the 1990’s that was used to show kids that their families needed to get access to the internet due to the endless possibilities. I thought that this was a great reminder as to how magical and amazing everyone thought the internet was about thirty years ago, and now we take it for granted so much. He then talked about how recently the government has been convinced that the internet has been hijacked and become weaponized. Some are even saying that what occurred with the 2016 elections should be considered an act of war.

One of the most important things that Levine said was the fact that our understanding and belief of the internet is based off of the false premise that the internet is some amazing wondrous thing that is only supposed to help us. He reminded the audience that the internet was created as a weapon for the government. Then he went into how the internet was made by a Pentagon program as a way to gain information about people to see who was more likely to be a resistant force. I thought that he was not the best at grasping the audience’s attention as he went through the history of the internet, and I felt that some of his points were lost because people were zoning out. But overall, I thought that this talk put a lot into perspective for me. Everyone recently has been up in arms about what the internet has become, but it has always been like this and we are just becoming more aware of it as the computers get smarter.

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In Howard and Jane Giles’ “Ingroups and Outgroups” chapter, I found the concepts highly applicable to studying leader/follower dynamics on small and large scales. I appreciated that the authors acknowledged that people might have multiple facets to their identities (i.e. being Korean American) that are central to a person’s identity depending on the circumstance. Furthermore, I was particularly interested by the idea of “intergroup boundaries” presented by the authors; specifically, the example of the differences in table manners among Brits and Americans. While the two nations share the “ingroup” quality of speaking the same language (despite dialectical differences), there is an intergroup boundary of food and drink. When traveling to any country, it is important to familiarize oneself with the cultural knowledge of a habit such as eating practices. A “bilingual eater” would speak both eating “languages” of Britain and the United States, and these differences are important to understanding group dynamics of a particular culture. Furthermore, when traveling to another nation, it is important to think about how you might be labeled due to your national origin, as a categorization threat could occur.

Reading “Ingroups and Outgroups” for a second time (I did so before in Leadership and the Social Sciences” gave me a reminder of the importance of calling out stereotypes and being conscientious of them on a global level. After learning about leadership concepts specifically correlated to the humanities, I had a different reaction to the article; learning how literature/art, oratory, and history impact leadership, the concept of ingroups/outgroups are largely applicable to several contexts.

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The Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War movement were more related than I initially realized.  Who was sent over to fight for the United States was problematic. This is because the draft was inherently racist, in addition to discriminating against poorer Americans.  At one point in the video a narrator said that, “If you’re white, middle-class, and a dean’s list kind of guy, then relax”. The narrator was essentially saying that a college educated white man would not be drafted, which brings up the unequal aspects of the draft itself.  There was strong opposition to the Vietnam war, but the United States established laws that were aimed to prevent drafted men from refusing to go overseas to fight. If a person would refuse to go and fight in the war, then they could be convicted of draft resistant. Muhammad Ali, who was a strong opponent of the draft and the war, refused to fight and as a result lost his heavyweight belt.  The draft resistant laws forced many people, who were ‘randomly selected’, to go fight in a war that they did not believe in or support. 

 

The video about the Anti-War movement is especially interesting to me because I live about thirty minutes away from where the Kent State shooting occurred.  I have learned about the incident over and over again as a student in Ohio, but its impact in the Anti-war movement is still surprising to me to this day. The video mentioned how the Kent State shooting acted as a catalyst of sorts for people, who otherwise would have stayed silent, to speak up against the war This is impactful for me because I always think of Kent State as just a random college in my backyard, but for an incident to occur there and change the course of American history is mindblowing for an Ohioan like me.

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I learned a lot about the Vietnam War and the protests surrounding it in my APUSH class in high school and the violence and live footage of brutality still surprises me. At one point I knew the timeline of the actual war and each significant bombing in Vietnam but I think there more important information to get out of the Vietnam War era is the power of rhetoric from both sides of the conflict (the government and the citizens…not the US and North Vietnam).

One example of the powerful rhetoric used by the protester-side was the statistic shared by MLK Jr. He said something along the lines of ‘we have spent almost $230 on each enemy we kill abroad but only spend about $50 per person who lives in poverty in our own country’. I think this is extremely powerful because it demonstrates the power of aversion and diversion by the government that somehow labels international threats as more deadly than domestic ones. One thing I have learned about in this class and many of my other classes this year is that the US has a lot of work to do on its own before we can go trying to fix other places. Entering Vietnam was definitely the first mistake but mistake after mistake is what made people angry and dug the government into a deeper deeper hole of distrust.

From the other side however, the government, one part of the video that struck me as particularly powerful rhetoric was when Nixon said that the only people who can beat America are Americans themselves, not the North Vietnamese. At first I was perplexed by this comment, but then I realized it was a response to the protests across the country. I can definitely see how protesters felt they needed to resort to violence (for example throwing rocks at the National Guard at Kent State) but the response of deathly violence of guns to something like rocks is alarming to me.

Overall, I think the use of strong rhetoric from popular leaders on both sides of the protest conflict has shaped our countries views on the conflict as a whole as well as how the media can influence decisions almost too well. Now, it seems as if there is a “breaking news” story every five minutes on the news. We are lucky to live in a world where there are lots of ways to read about and view news, but if we are not careful, it is easy to get fed too much of one side of every story.

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I was very impacted by the youth who were so involved in these protests. College students, young adults and even teenagers banded together to speak out against unnecessary violence and war and spoke to promote peace. In this case, children and young people were more pacifist than many adults or older people, which seems to be frequently the case, but was very concrete and obvious in this specific case.

In a broader sense, young people oftentimes seem to be the ones speaking against violence and inequality and advocating for equality and progressive values. These people are often not listened to on account of their youthfulness, such as Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old who advocated for action to be taken against climate change. Older people have more ‘life experience’ or ‘wisdom’ and somehow in their minds this equates to accuracy and more knowledge. It is crucial that people of all demographics, including age, listen to one another.

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The Anti-war movement is one of the most interesting movements of the new left, I feel like it is very interesting because we see many different Americans from different backgrounds supporting the movement. Even MLK and Civil rights groups opposed the war. Even though it affected different groups in different ways, people still came together to fight against “tyranny”. It is in movements like these that I wonder how democratic our country really is, because of the sheer amounts of people who wanted to pull out of the war and end it, there was very little action by the government to appease the protestors until the very end. Even still it can be argued that the war only ended because we had actually lost.

One thing in this video that surprised me were the reactions of the soldiers already in Vietnam to the draft protests. They stated that if they should have been fighting than those at home protesting should be here with them or have already given up their lives for the country. I think they felt as if their service wasn’t being appreciated which was not the intention of the anti-war movement. Further, this video pointed out how political parties would use these movements to come into power. With Nixon’s rise to power.

Another thing this video opened my eyes to was the power behind college students and how dedicated they were to the movement, they fought the national guard many times and suffered many blows, however, they stayed until the end.

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After watching this short informative film I understand why it is titled “The 20th Century: Vietnam Protest Movement” because wow, there were a lot of protests and a lot of different sides as the war in Vietnam continued. Divides in the country were formed.

It is always a red flag when the authority (the government) is being violent and oppressive to a large group of people. I feel that when there is a large group of citizens, nationwide who feel a certain way their thoughts should be heard and dealt with in a regimented protocol that gives voices to the people in a way that they can be heard effectively. The tensions that arose between the government forces and antiwar protesters were all due to fear on both sides. Fear for the lives of loved ones or oneself being sent to kill or die in a country halfway around the world for reasons that were unclear and unjust and fear of the countries reputation stays intact. The government’s murdering of protestors is also a red flag that in my opinion dirties the reputation of the US government around the world and for those who live in it.

Also- something that infuriated me was Nixon’s comment on how we as a country could not let North Korea win because that would be embarrassing and American’s dont loose….. LIKE WHAT. I understand it is important to have pride and to give each effort your all, however, with an incitative that was unclear and not supported by so many, including those who were being legally forced to fight, kill, and risk their own lives it is poor leadership and unjust. This just brings me back to how many early presidents (GWashington) played a long hands-on role in the battlefields in battles that were fighting for conflict in our own country; I wonder if the pride and reputation of America would come first if government officials or Nixon himself were forced to be on the battlefield.

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In the US I feel that we talk about the civil war and the world war’s much more than the Vietnam. This is odd to me because the Vietnam war was a pretty catastrophe heavy war. In the video I got a sense of the social movements that took place during the war. The anti-protest’s against the war spilled over into much grander issues in the United States. The “unjustness” of the draft caused issues within the United States to be highlighted.

The Civil Rights inequalities was one of the major issues. I feel like the Civil Rights Movement and leaders became stronger because of this. If the African Americans in the US were not being treated fairly, then why should they serve this country? I think the intersection of different movements here is neat. The anti-draft and Civil Rights movements fed off of each other for their arguments. Both groups provided more reasons not to go to war, and not to follow the leader-the United States.

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I think this protest movement gained so much traction and become such a big part of the nation was that a lot of people could relate to the inequalities of this draft. College, marriage, and money could allow people to decline going, and also Vietnam’s war was not so much our place to step in. Not only did it not involve us, but the Vietnamese people did not want us there. The years of fighting only resulted in very insignificant changes to the latitude lines between North and South, but over 25,000 American men died and couldn’t come home after fighting “a war that wasn’t ours.” I do think, however, the booklet created to avoid the draft, such as faking madness or homosexuality, is very unpatriotic and naive of the men to make. I agree that people should be able to decline the draft on some terms but the booklet took it too far in my opinion.

The extremism of the anti-war protest and how it seemed that world was getting taken over by these radical protestors didn’t help their cause. In my opinion, anyone who is trying to achieve a goal or in a leadership position, a cool and calm approach will more likely get them what they want than violence or extreme acts of protest. This goes back to effective leadership styles and I don’t think that the college students who began this protest necessarily obtained this qualities, maybe giving the reason for why the removal of last soldiers didn’t occur until 1973, eight years after the first soldiers were sent over.

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This past week I had attended a talk about race. Race is something that, unfortunately, still affects our society today. There is an organization in which there are post cards sent out and participants will send them back with a story that they would like to share in a short six words. Some of the stories shared were; “Married a white girl. Now what?”, “No where are you actually from?”. The idea of these stories were to bring a voice to a silent topic. Racism is thought to be something that was abolished many years ago but the matter of the fact is that it still exists today and is still heavily prevalent. This relates to our class Leaders today are still judged by their skin color. There was an Italian man, Rudy Giuliani who was ranked first in his class at Columbia and wanted to run for presidency but was hesitant and ended up not running due to the color of his skin and his association with the mob. Although he was not affiliated with the mafia in any way at all, the fact that he was Italian made him automatically affiliated with that stigma negatively. The value of listening and coming to venues like these is to hear other peoples stories and what it is like to live in different skin.  

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In the talk that I went to on Tuesday November 12^th, 2019 the speaker Michelle Norris discussed her work with the Race Card Project. I really enjoyed this talk because Norris was taking a completely different approach to having those hard conversations about race in the US. She was explaining why she wanted to even do this project in the first place, and the was saying that she wanted to lubricate the conversation about race. The way that the Race Card Project worked was 200 post cards were sent out asking people do express race in only six words. Norris got a lot of things that she did not necessarily expect back. There were a lot of “no word for what I am” or “father was racist. I’m Not. Progress!”. All of these results were super interesting because people ended up writing a lot of things that they would probably never say in real life.

I really enjoyed this talk because it brought to light a lot more of the problems with how race is dealt with in this country, especially because most of what was being written on the race cards were things that people would not be comfortable to say out loud. One example that really stuck out to me was the example of a principal hiring a person named Jamal. This was because the principal wanted to promote more diversity in the school, and he assumed that Jamal was black due to his name. Then when he showed up, and he was not black the secretary said something along the lines of “oh I thought you would be taller”. To me this shows how we need a change in this country, which is why I respect what Michelle Norris is doing because she is trying to keep the conversation about race going, and change it for the better.

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Before watching this video I knew of some of the controversies regarding the Vietnamese war. However, I did not know of the extreme amount of chaos and social uprising that this war brought about. I was unaware that similar to WWI and WWII that men between the ages of 18-26 were forced to enlist and of those men only the ones of lesser intelligence were forced to go. This caused anger throughout the college youth and a feeling of injustice which sparked rioting at universities, rioting at major metropolitan cities, as well as violence against police and military officials. Many people did not believe in the war we were fighting halfway across the world which created this unrest amongst military-aged men and citizens of the United States. This caused extreme division against citizens of the United States and caused anger amongst the man deployed and why they were forced to fight when these other men were not obligated to do so.

 

I did some further research on this topic and discovered that Vietnamese women, as well as children, were forced to fight in the war as well. This caused again extreme unrest amongst American citizens and as long as US soldiers were being sent into Vietnam to fight Vietnamese women, as well as children, would continue to fight. It made me question what my actions would have been if I was a college-aged student during this time period. Would I have protested or would I have served my country in Vietnam? This also calls into question the psychological principle of mob mentality where people take actions they would not usually take if their identity was known because there are no immediate repercussions.

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I thought this reading was interesting. The dynamic ingroups and outgroups form by playing off each other reminds me of a catch 22 in some cases. In the case of an American who is fluent in Japanese, it seems like it is not possible to penetrate into the group because of the lack of the common group knowledge, but the only way to get that knowledge is to be a part of the ingroup.

One of the most interesting factors for me was how much of an effect language has on creating and maintaining ingroups and outgroups. On a basic level it makes sense, because if you don’t speak the common language of a certain group, it will automatically mark you as someone different. However, one factor that I didn’t really consider is the fact that each language has specific markers and emphasis on how it is spoken, the way it is spoken, and what is spoken. For example, I read an article recently called “Why the French Love to Say No.” One of the points in the article explained that while the English language has over 500,000 words, French only has around 70,000. As a result, while English is rather explicit and direct in how it is spoken and not heavily reliant on context, French is much more reliant on context and other expressions to show meaning, and ‘non’ can have many different layers of meaning and not actually mean no. Considering the fact that different languages operate in fundamentally different ways can be very helpful in converging different groups.

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Last week, I attended a c-suite conversation featuring Don Godwin, the chief financial officer of Newport News Shipbuilding, the largest manufacturing employer in Virginia. The interview had an emphasis on leadership in the business world. He had some really great things to say, some of which revolved around what we’ve talked about in class. Though he didn’t use any textbook terms that we have gone over in class, he talked a lot about the importance of staying in touch with what was happening at the shipyard, where the overwhelming majority of employees at the company work. He talked about visiting the shipyard often to see how things were going, and that he much preferred the visits that the shipbuilders did not know he was coming. This was because he said he viewed himself as equal to them and did not want to see a show put on for him, rather wanted to see the shipbuilders working as they do normally. Not only do I think this statement said a lot about him as a person, but as an executive leader as well.

Godwin also spoke briefly about the importance of having different minded executives. He gave some details about what made him and the CEO very different, yet explained why those differences become so useful in collaboration and coming up with new ideas. This made me think about the importance of different types of leaders within organizations. Though an organization or movement usually has one face that represents the movement, there are so many more important and influential leaders that make huge impacts, but they just are not in the limelight. I overall found the discussion very interesting and I thought he had a lot of great things to say about business, ships, and leadership.

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Prior to watching this video, I was not aware of all the resistance that occurred in the US during the Vietnam war. People were very passionate and expressive about there feelings.  One example that struck me was Muhammad Ali, refusing to go into war after being drafted and getting stripped of his title.  It is crazy how far this went. While watching this video I was wondering, how did it get to the point where it was that bad?

While watching this video I was disturbed about how bad it got and how the movement traveled onto college campuses. Particularly the one in Kent State. The students were hit with tear gas and then they started shooting and killing four students and a dozen were wounded. It was noted that this was the climax of the anti-war movement and I totally agree with that statement.

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The Vietnam Protest was a movement against the United States involvement in the war, in addition to the draft. This draft would kill thousands of young American men to die, and protests were being held during this time on college campuses throughout the nation. Many young men claimed that the reason they were protesting was because they didn’t want to be forced to fight in a war that wasn’t their, and one they barely knew about.  According to this film, the draft was initially created to give all men an equal chance to fight and represent their country in times of war. However, as it was soon discovered, there were many loopholes in the picking process. If a man was in college or was college educated, his draft admittance was deferred. Additionally, if a man was married, he was also deferred. This concept angered many people, and from this came the Vietnam Protest Movement. 

I completely see the argument that the protestors had, and if I were a young man during this time period I would be scared every day that I would randomly be called to serve in the war. Moreover, I also see why the draft was created and being used, and why it was hard to cut their cords with Vietnam after being involved. I also see why men wanted to serve, and why they were proud to be serving as American soldiers. However, I don’t agree with the idea that certain men were exempt from war and others were not. Just because a man wasn’t married doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a family or girlfriend that loves him very much, and just because a man isn’t college educated doesn’t mean the value of his life should be measured in a different manner than someone who was. I also think that people should be working together during times of stress, and this movement created a huge divide amongst the men of America; those who wanted to serve, and those who didn’t. 

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Before watching this video, I understood that the Vietnam War was a highly contested, extremely divisive moment in American history. I had heard about the shooting at Kent State and the enormous role students took in the protests. One thing I wasn’t taught in school was the way the draft targeted specific populations. By getting married or going to college, men would be deferred from the draft, leaving those without the means to do so vulnerable. It also led to a disproportionate amount of young black Americans being killed in a war many of the troops fighting didn’t even believe in, as evidenced by them throwing away their medals during protests. 

Another thing I didn’t understand was the government – particularly Nixon’s – role in fostering division among the American people. When Nixon took office, he promised a quick, peaceful end to the war and removal of American troops from Vietnam. However, within the year following his inauguration he had not only not ended American involvement in Vietnam, but further increased it in what many viewed as an invasion of Cambodia. He also actively pitted anti-war protesters against those who supported it by calling those in favor of the war “patriots” and using derogatory terms for those who were against it. He added to this by defending the National Guard who open fired on college students merely using their right to protest. I knew Nixon because of his later mistakes as president, but learning this about him made me think about the president’s role in our country. Not only should they be transparent about their actions and follow through on their word – things Nixon didn’t do – but they should also work towards peace among the American people instead of quite literally the opposite.

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