I’ve been home since I first left for spring break on March 6th, 2020, aside from the day that I returned to NCCU to move out all of my things. I live in Bowie, MD, and it’s about a 4 1/2 hour drive from NCCU, 6 if you take the bus, which is how I usually travel home. I work at a grocery store called Wegmans, and I’ve spent a lot of time there since I’ve been home considering that grocery stores are considered essential businesses as of right now. Therefore, the management at my job is a primary source for me in regards to retrieving information as far as corona virus updates. I haven’t been too concerned with the virus in the past few weeks, but my job’s management gives all of the employees important updates as necessary. All of my other sources that have been keeping me connected are virtual (Twitter, news, etc). I receive updates about assignments through my professors via Blackboard or email. However, it’s a bit overwhelming when you’re just at home/work, and you check your phone to see multiple notifications from professors in regards to assignments. To be completely honest, I’m worried that I may fall behind because there seems to be so much going on at the same time regarding assignments. Every time I turn around, there seems to be another test or assignment due soon and I don’t think that I’ve been handling my stressors the right way. Usually when I get very stressed out by multiple assignments, I start to feel like I’m having a mental breakdown. I don’t necessarily feel as though I’m having one right now, but I feel like it’s coming, so I’m doing my best to try and manage my stress while still staying on top of all of my assignments.
Jasmine Crowe speaks at TEDWomen 2019: Bold + Brilliant, December 4-6, 2019, Palm Springs, California. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED
“Food is health, food is life.” -Jasmine Crowe
On March 3rd, 2020 in my MSCM 2400 class, our class watched a TED Talk hosted by Jasmine Crowe, an NCCU alumna dedicated to helping solve the challenge of world hunger. Jasmine Crowe is a very accomplished woman, and she shared during her TED Talk some statistics regarding world hunger, and what she was doing to help solve it. Globally, about 1/9 people our hungry, however, our food waste is currently higher than ever, often filling up landfills and releasing harmful chemical into the atmosphere when it begins to rot (methane gases). Therefore, Jasmine Crowe put together a few things to help contribute to the cause.
One of these things that she created was a pop-up restaurant that allowed homeless people to “dine with dignity” and it was called Super Soul Kitchen. She was also able to design an app that worked with big organizations with excess food waste, and transported said food waste to hungry people in need. This app also provides these corporations with a tax break based on how much they donate. This gives these large companies an incentive to donate and I’m sure that this contributed to how much food waste she has been able to collect and transport to hungry people. In 2016, France actually passed a law that made it illegal for supermarkets to waste food, or they will get fined.
Jasmine Crowe stated that making a change can not only help reduce food waste, but it can also increase school attendance as well as reduce certain health cases. She used the phrase “food is health, food is life,” which I thoroughly agree with, because a lot can be affected based on the food that we eat. It was very nice to see Jasmine Crowe’s TED Talk, because I was able to see an NCCU student in real life that went off after graduation and made a name for herself. That being said, I found Crowe’s TED Talk to be inspiring, and I’m glad that Professor Chambers showed it to our class.
“If you’re an educated man, they can’t take anything away from you.”-Shaquille O’Neal
In my mass communications class on February 18th, 2020, Professor Chambers showed us a clip of Shaquille O’Neal doing an interview with Wall Street Journal, discussing his path to where he is now. I found the interview to be very interesting, and I got to learn quite a few things about Shaq that I didn’t know before.
Shaquille O’Neal is technically considered a doctor because he has a PhD in education.
O’Neal owns several different franchises with many companies, including Krispy Kreme, Five Guys, and 24 Hour Fitness.
His first big investment was in Google.
Throughout the course of the interview, Shaquille O’Neal emphasized the importance of being educated. One thing that he said that stood out to me, was that he was “taught by scare tactics” to become a businessman. I thought O’Neal’s choice of wording was very interesting when he said that, but I agree that it’s very important to be a businessman and to understand what you’re spending your money on if you want to a) accumulate a lot of money, and b) maintain your wealth. Another thing that stood out to me was how much energy he’s willing to put into things he believes in, but how little he will put into things that he doesn’t believe in.
Shaquille O’Neal shared a very interesting story about an opportunity he was once offered to be featured on the cover of the Wheaties box of cereal. Even though I’ve personally never had Wheaties before, I’ve heard about it before and I’ve always known Wheaties to be a pretty reputable brand. However, O’Neal shared that at the time, he’d never tried the cereal, and he didn’t care to because it wasn’t one of his favorite cereals. Therefore, he passed up the opportunity. As shocking as that was to me to hear at first, it showed me that O’Neal cared about more than just the potential money that he could make from the opportunity. This just further reinforced that O’Neal will only invest his time/energy into ideas that he genuinely believes in, which I find to be pretty respectable.
During our MCSM 2400 class recently, Professor Chambers showed us an animated short film titled ‘Hair Love’. The film was very well received and received an accolade from the Academy Awards for best animated short film. ‘Hair Love’ is a story that focuses on a young black girl who needs to get her hair done a certain way for her ballet recital. The short film also touches on family (ill family members, familial gender roles, etc.), love, and focuses on black hair.
As the film begins, the main character (a young black girl, approx. between ages 5-9) needs to get her hair done for a ballet recital, so she attempts to do it. However, her hair is very large and ‘unruly’, so she’s unable to do it. When the little girl’s father comes in and sees her dilemma, he attempts to do it for her. After he’s unsuccessful as well, he attempts to put a hat on her hair, causing her to cry and lock herself in the bathroom. Realizing he disappointed his daughter, the father finds an old video of his wife doing his daughter’s hair, and comes back to his daughter to try again. After focusing on the video and putting in a lot of hard work, the father is finally able to get his daughter’s hair into the hairstyle that she wanted.
Once the father and daughter share a sentimental moment, they finally leave the house. Before dropping his daughter off at school though, they go to visit his wife in the hospital, who appears to be a cancer patient considering the fact that she’s bald. The mother looks at her daughter’s head, and the family exchanges a happy moment before the father wheels his wife out of the hospital, giving his daughter a fist pump on the way out. This is how the film ends.
I felt like I was able to relate to the film in some ways coming from a black household, but I was also unable to relate to certain things. Growing up as a black boy, I’ve never had hair that was hard to manage, because my father would take me to get it cut when it got a certain length. However, growing up with a little sister, I remember witnessing my mother doing my sister’s hair often, and I remember my sister often crying throughout the process. I feel as though black hair is very different from hair of other cultures, considering our hair texture(s), therefore making the products we use and hairstyles we adapt very different from those of other races. I believe that the short film does a good job representing black families and the complexities of black hair.
Also, when I was younger, my mother had breast cancer. Although my mother caught the cancer early on and was cancer-free in a short time, her contracting cancer took a toll on my family, which intensified the circumstances in this short film for me because I was able to relate to an extent. At the beginning of the film, I initially thought that her mother had died, because it was clear that she wasn’t around when the little girl needed her hair done. I was happy at the end to see that her mother was still alive, and I think it was a nice way to unite the family for a conclusion. I also believe that making the mother bald shows a good contrast between her and her daughter, and it’s somewhat unexpected because the videos/pictures of her mother beforehand show her with a lot of hair, just like her daughter. However, I think that the father and daughter still showing the mother love with a bald head is a form of hair love as well, tying into the theme that black people are beautiful no matter what their hair looks like.
In class on January 23rd, 2020, we watched Tyler Perry’s speech from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in class. Throughout Tyler Perry’s speech, they not only mentioned his triumphs, but they mentioned how he struggled on his way to fame. I found it inspiring how in the beginning, Tyler would have such a low audience turnout, but he continued working towards his goal until he blew up. Tyler Perry expressed how he built his brand trying to elevate and be above the other plays he was seeing that were out. Therefore, Perry worked to make sure he had good sets, costumes, etc., in contrast to a lot of plays that he observed at the time with very minimal sets, costumes, etc.
Tyler Perry attributes most of his success to being focused. Therefore, he was determined to make it, and he did just that by using high-risk endurance. Perry defined high-risk endurance as being able to do things that are out of the ordinary. Another tool that he says was key to him in his journey was having an emotional tolerance, an ability to push through despite negative comments. However, despite any adversity that came his way, Perry has been in the game for over 25 years now, and he was able to create a multi-million dollar production studio. I was inspired by the journey that he went through in order to achieve that studio. In the video, they showed how Tyler Perry started off with a small studio, and how as his business kept expanding, he had to keep upgrading his studio size until he eventually ended up with the studio he has now.
“While you’re over there fighting for a seat at the table, I’ll be over here building my own.”
Tyler Perry, National Association of Black Journalists Master Class (2018)
In class on Tuesday, January 21st, we watched an episode of Trigger Warning with Killer Mike. Even though I didn’t agree with everything in the episode, I thought that they made some valid points. One thing in the episode that I thought had a very interesting perspective was Killer Mike’s point of view on segregation. What Killer Mike described was that although segregation had a lot of negative aspects, he described how one positive thing about segregation was the fact that black people had to get all of their good/services from other black people. Therefore, “black dollars” were being recycled through the black ecosystem, making the black economy more sustainable. However, now that we’ve desegregated, many white goods/services have taken over the market, and a lot of times we (black people) will purchase a lot of these goods/services without even thinking about it, over possibly purchasing these products through black retailers. Throughout the episode, as Killer Mike was purchasing only black goods/services in Atlanta and Athens, I found it surprising to see such a drastic difference between the availability of black goods and services in Atlanta, vs. Athens. In Atlanta, Killer Mike was able to find black food, black cellphones, etc. very easily, but in Athens, black goods/services were nearly scarce. Overall, the episode gave me a very interesting perspective and it gave me a lot to think about.
I’m gonna take you all from being passive consumers, to being active creators.
— Prof. Chambers
On Tuesday, January 14th, I began my first day in the class Introduction to Mass Communications MSCM 2400. I enrolled in the class because I recently changed my major from Business Administration to Mass Communications, so this class was required for the major. Although the class was mandatory, I’m happy that I have to take it because it made me realize that changing my major was the right decision. After spending 30 minutes in this class, I realized that I was finally in the major that centered around all of the skills that I’d spent my life trying to work on. Since I was a child, I’ve dedicated a lot of time towards creative writing and acting, because these were 2 hobbies that I loved the most. Therefore, I realized that if what I really loved to do was entertain, that it made no sense to be a business major, even though I’d convinced myself that business was the most practical choice. However, after my first day in Intro to Mass Communications, I realized that my whole life was about to change. It was invigorating to be surrounded by people who shared similar aspirations as me and for the first time in my college career, I felt like I actually was doing what I was supposed to be doing.
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