Journal 2- 3rd class meeting

What defines excellance: To be a good journalist _____________ (fill in the blank).

Our professor asked us this question at last Tuesday's class meeting... 

Everyone raised their hands to offer their suggestions and share ideas on the matter. Some of the qualities and traits mentioned were: cover the uncovered, admitting to biases, telling both sides of a good, give a voice to the voiceless, draw the reader in, humanity, etc.

By the end of the discussion, the whiteboard was covered with a variety of excellent traits and qualities. However, there was no mention of ethnicity, gender, race or class. It's as if it didn't cross any of our minds or maybe we just didn't want to say it out loud.

The realization was that everything we listed had nothing to do with race. In a way, it showed that as journalism students we are colorblind.

In addition to the good spirit present at the University with the excitement surrounding Tuesday's 44th presidential Inauguration, professor Reisner let us out quite early that night. 

All in all, a very pleasant day and another interesting and insightful class meeting!

Journal 1c- IAT test

So, I visited Project Implicit and took the Gender-Career IAT test. It was weird at first since I had never taken one of their tests but I slowly caught on. 

My results showed I did associate women with family more and men with careers more but that's not my personal feeling on the matter. I didn't feel offended by the test. The results are to be expected. It's what we have learned growing up and what society has pressed upon us. Women are more commonly associated with family (stay-at-home moms) and men more with careers (CEO/president). 

My mom is and has been the hard-working one in my family so although I do think women relate more with family they also relate very much to careers. My mom did both and climbed her way up the corporate ladder, showing me that women can be successful with both family and career. I strongly believe it is possible. I was lucky enough to witness it. 

The IAT results are what they are. There's no need to get your "panties in a bunch" over it. Something i've learned from professor Reisner in these first two weeks: "Don't take it personal!" I'm sure there will be many more lessons throughout the semester.

 I'm taking notes...

Journal 1b- 2nd class meeting

Our second class meeting of Multi- Ethnic Reporting wasn't as shocking as the first but i'm sure there is more to come in the upcoming weeks. 

This class meeting was very informative. It answered the questions I had on the blogs, Listening Posts, journals, etc. I was able to get a clearer understanding of the uncomfortable place we are to visit and why. Although, it will be nerve-wrecking in the beginning, it actually sounds like it's going to be an interesting assignment and experience. 

So, it's all starting to come together, slowly... Just like the race/gender assignment we did in the first class meeting, uncomfortable at first but a learning experience in the end. 

Watching the clips from the Barbershop movie was entertaining, I almost forgot I had been at school for 10 plus hours! It helped me decided on my three choices for the listening post assignment. 

So, with pending approval from professor Reisner, I might be going to the barbershop. 

Uh-oh...

Journal 1a- 1st class meeting

You don't always know what to expect on the first day of class.

Having already attended two classes earlier in the day and having the great pleasure of meeting Professor Neil Reisner, I already knew I was in for a real treat. The next 2 1/2 hours would prove to be a unique experience. 

Multi-Ethnic Reporting. Hmm, sounds interesting and exciting! For our first assignment, we split up into groups of 3 and 4, making sure not to look at our paper with instructions until we were told to. Professor Reisner explained the assignment and with each word he read, I convinced myself more and more how unfair and mean this assignment was. 

We were given a company and equally qualified employees, whom we were to assign to various positions from company president to human resources manager and we could only base our decision on the person's race and gender. How inappropriate!

 So my group and I decided to assign people to the positions based on the greater percentage of population because we were too uncomfortable to judge these make-believe people by their race and gender. Plus, we didn't want to offend anyone in class when it was our turn to explain why we assigned a certain person to the position.

But what came out of some people's mouth was definitely shocking. I mean, I guess that was the point of the exercise, to get us to realize that we can be racist without even meaning to. It was an uncomfortable assignment but very eye-opening. 

My group was the only one to not put the Asian man as the accountant. We did that purposely because we knew everyone would put him in that position since "Asians are extremely smart in mathematics." And we ended up being right.