31
August
2017

News Comment #27

This week, I decided to do my news comment on an article titled “These Somali Men Oppose Male Stereotypes to Fight for Female Empowerment” by Alice Rowsome on Vice. The article discussed the efforts of a Somali man named Khadar is challenging the societal norms of his country surrounding the women and girls. He focuses on issues like stopping female genital mutilation, violence towards females, and getting females to become involved in journalism which is a highly uncommon job for women in Somalia. Khadar stresses the importance of getting these women involved in the media as well as informing other men on these issues to try to make a change.

The lead for this news story is extremely effective as it explains how Khadar had to convince his sister not to perform female genital mutilation on her own daughter, and that really hooks a reader since this isn’t something one thinks about in Western society. It sounds horrifying, and is enough to make a person want to read about what this man is trying to do. This story is definitely news worthy because it had impact on about 98 percent of girls and women in these part of the world which is awful to even think about especially when it comes to FGM. It is an issue that should concern true feminists because girls like these are the ones who need feminism the most having to endure violence against them or being forced to undergo FGM for religious reasons despite the effects is not okay.

You can read the full article here https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/mbb438/these-somali-men-oppose-male-stereotypes-to-fight-for-female-empowerment

30
August
2017

Let’s Meet Marcus!4

Today I met Marcus Mackey, a junior and now mass communications major at Morningside. With his focus on mass communication he hopes to become a sports broadcaster, but before settling on his major he changed it twice. He comes from the southwest region of Iowa, and came to Morningside because it was far from home but also close enough that he cold go back home relatively easily if something came up being only a 3 hour drive away. Over the past two summer’s Marcus has worked at Fareway, a grocery chain located in the Midwest.

He graduated from a school with a graduating class of 15 in 2015, 13 if you don’t count the foreign exchange students. Although he graduated from a very small school, Marcus was very involved in high school with speech contests, reader’s theater, and poetry and prose. Also, he is a dog person, but he doesn’t mind other animals.

25
August
2017

News Comment #11

For my first news comment, I’ve decided to discuss a Vox article called National Revulsion Over the Charlottesville March Shows Why We Shouldn’t Ban Hate Speech by Robert C. Post. The article was written in response to what had occurred  in Charlottesville, Virginia. The article outlines how the organizer of the alt right Unite the Right rally, Jason Kessler, had intended for the event to be peaceful, well as peaceful as an event involving people with hateful ideologies can be. However, many of his supporters brought weapons in addition to their hateful slogans which makes this an issue not only concerning free speech, but the lack of constitutional protection from serious threats.

It becomes an issue of protection from serious threats as the police remained passive long enough for chaos to erupt. Their purpose should have been to deescalate the situation as opposed to letting what they let go on occur. They should be held accountable to some extent for the events that occurred because they chose to remain passive in a time when it was so clear that they needed to intervene which could have prevented the injuries and the death that occurred. The people who were put at risk of danger from the rally were not protected from this true and serious threat to their lives which is the bigger issue here.

I get why people would call for hate speech to be banned, but that does not help to eliminate the problem as a whole. It in no way changes the beliefs that these people have or prevents them from passing it on to other or their children, and it doesn’t ensure that these people will adhere to laws against hate speech. Robert Post made a huge point at the end of the article when he says that the purpose of the constitutional right to free speech is to allow us to question what we should do and what should be done with what we know. Without knowledge of what people think and believe, as wrong as they may be, it becomes hard to change their opinions as well as understand things that are still wrong with our world today.

Banning hate speech isn’t going to solve the problem in it’s entirety because the problem lies in that these people are somehow allowed to essentially form a militia when protesters of other groups that remained peaceful  were met with brute force when faced with the police. This kind of treatment towards people who are so obviously willing to get violent because of their hateful beliefs is what needs to change. While I don’t believe hate speech should be banned because it brings issues in our society to light, I do believe that we should not be treating these people as though they are not a threat to those whom their hateful ideologies affect personally.