#mq74

The mentor plenary was a good change for a plenary for once as well as the past documentary plenary. One thing I really liked is when they opened up the floor for people to share their experiences about micro-aggression they have faced. As we sat there listening to everyone’s micro-aggression, I sat thinking about all of the micro-aggression me and my family have faced and still continue to face. I remembered a time in which I was at the store with my sister and her friend. He had asked me if it was true that I joined the US Army. I told him yes and then he asked me if I had joined for the benefits. When he asked me that I told him, that I had joined to provide freedom for those in the United States of America for him and his family and future kids and he just laughed. Moments later, an employee of the store who was my sister’s friend friend too stood up and said to him “Hey man, if you do not stand behind our troops you can go ahead and stand in front of them.” I was surprised yet very happy because I was about to go off on him if I would have lost my chill. #OWNED lol

Excellent Video about society, if you have time I would definitely recommend taking a look at this video. Everything we define ourselves as are labels imposed upon us before we are even born and this is something we do not really talk about. This video really had me re-vist experiences in my lifetime where I was labeled solely on what my background was or what i looked like. Rather than for who I really was. 

This plenary was one of the most interesting plenaries I have attended with one of the biggest panels, diversity wise. It was consistent within the groups hat no matter what religion they fell under, there were things about their religion that they did and did not agree with. This just goes to show that even the most successful people in their statuses face challenges between their own ideologies and their society’s ideology. The person on the panel I could identify the most with is the lawyer, I forget her name. :( Sorry. But she identified as Muslim. She was an inspiring speaker because she had to face the ideology of society being that women cannot hold positions that men can especially in the law field. She described her experience as whenever she walked in the room often times they thought she was the paralegal rather than the lawyer. The reason why I identify a lot with her is because she has gone through what I will soon go through once I graduate law school which is scary that I will have to face men in their “expert” profession. 

This was a movie event presented by Rutgers University, and it is a documentary on the culture of rape and sexual assault in a university setting. It is crazy that some university do not want the word of this idea of Rape Culture taking over prestigious universities. To some colleges their reputations are more important than the students, which is insane. If you have the time I would recommend watching this documentary it describes the level of corruption in the society we live in today. 

The film on Intersex really was informative and interesting. It is really sad that people are being forced to have a fixed gender before the child can even be cognitive about themselves and who they want to be. To me, these doctors recommending parents to put their children through hard and life long surgical procedures that are not even necessary. In the documentary it showed a series of individuals, some which had surgical procedures and others who were perfectly okay with their genitalia. Prior to this film, I really had no idea what intersex was or what it even meant about individual. This documentary really opened my eyes to how radical doctors have become. Their job is to bring children into this world and care for them, but yet they are counseling parents and telling them to run away and conform to society when in the end it may not even work out when their child is able to pick who exactly they want to be. Intersex people are regular people, their genitalia does not change who they are on the inside. We are all human, it is time we all treat each other like one. 

"Claiming an Education" is a speech that spoke out, I believe to each and everyone one of us. Especially those I feel who are in minority groups. All my life I have been surrounded by minorities and together we have faced many difficult times. Whether it be financially or simply fighting for the same equality the majority receives, the battle was continuous. College is something that is very expensive, but in the end we have seen that for women sometimes it means almost close to nothing. Just as the author, Adriene Rich states in this essay, a lot of women are not seen in higher level jobs such as administration. Everything is all based off of men and their opinions. Everything we learn in our course loads are all books written by men and contain their sole opinion. At a women's college it is something that should be changed, especially since those men writing these books do not appreciate who they go to. Many professors who worked at the Women's College of Douglass, did not see this as a high end job according to Rich. Many just saw it as simply a "job" not a profession. I believe that if they were to be teaching solely males, they would not feel the same way because they place themselves above women. Women have always been oppressed and it will be hard to change this in society, especially society today. Another passage we had to read called: "The Transformation of Silence into Language & Action," was something that caught my attention especially. It started off with a women profiling herself stating her background, who she was, and even her sexual preference. Now a days, this is common for people to openly say all this about themselves, sure. But this does not mean that because they say this about themselves that they are not judged for who they are. This author offers something else to her audience; to be fearless. To her, fear is silence. When we maintain our silence we fill ourselves with nothing but regret. How are we going to live a peaceful life and be content at our own decisions when we cannot even learn how to explain and use the freedom we fought  for, for so long in the past. The author experienced this when she was close to being diagnosed with cancer, a heart-wrenching disease. Many people look at cancer as the end of the road, and this is what she did and she did not like what she saw at the end of her world if this was necessarily true. All the things she kept to herself and silenced was nothing good. She realized that she allowed the world and society's expectations to control what she stated and presented herself as. She was not happy the way she was living. In her text, she presents her story to the audience and explains why we should go about helping each other demonstrate their true selves without being in fear of judgement. The last text that was given to us to read was interesting but I feel that it did not have much to do as the other two topics did. Like the text was interesting because it goes about saying how we apologize all the time for things that go on in our every day lives and sometimes do not even mean it. Therefore when we do go about apologizing, it never really does mean much because people use it so mindlessly that they do not value the true meaning of the word "sorry."

"Claiming an Education" is a speech that spoke out, I believe to each and everyone one of us. Especially those I feel who are in minority groups. All my life I have been surrounded by minorities and together we have faced many difficult times. Whether it be financially or simply fighting for the same equality the majority receives, the battle was continuous. College is something that is very expensive, but in the end we have seen that for women sometimes it means almost close to nothing. Just as the author, Adriene Rich states in this essay, a lot of women are not seen in higher level jobs such as administration. Everything is all based off of men and their opinions. Everything we learn in our course loads are all books written by men and contain their sole opinion. At a women's college it is something that should be changed, especially since those men writing these books do not appreciate who they go to. Many professors who worked at the Women's College of Douglass, did not see this as a high end job according to Rich. Many just saw it as simply a "job" not a profession. I believe that if they were to be teaching solely males, they would not feel the same way because they place themselves above women. Women have always been oppressed and it will be hard to change this in society, especially society today. Another passage we had to read called: "The Transformation of Silence into Language & Action," was something that caught my attention especially. It started off with a women profiling herself stating her background, who she was, and even her sexual preference. Now a days, this is common for people to openly say all this about themselves, sure. But this does not mean that because they say this about themselves that they are not judged for who they are. This author offers something else to her audience; to be fearless. To her, fear is silence. When we maintain our silence we fill ourselves with nothing but regret. How are we going to live a peaceful life and be content at our own decisions when we cannot even learn how to explain and use the freedom we fought  for, for so long in the past. The author experienced this when she was close to being diagnosed with cancer, a heart-wrenching disease. Many people look at cancer as the end of the road, and this is what she did and she did not like what she saw at the end of her world if this was necessarily true. All the things she kept to herself and silenced was nothing good. She realized that she allowed the world and society's expectations to control what she stated and presented herself as. She was not happy the way she was living. In her text, she presents her story to the audience and explains why we should go about helping each other demonstrate their true selves without being in fear of judgement. The last text that was given to us to read was interesting but I feel that it did not have much to do as the other two topics did. Like the text was interesting because it goes about saying how we apologize all the time for things that go on in our every day lives and sometimes do not even mean it. Therefore when we do go about apologizing, it never really does mean much because people use it so mindlessly that they do not value the true meaning of the word "sorry."

This is something that is very scary to think about in society. I feel like it is true. Like I myself I watch Jon Oliver more than I listen to presidential debates, because things that some candidates talk about, such as Donald Trump, are things that make me so mad that I cannot tolerate.