It literally felt like I was talking to Al Pacino from The Insider. I love to watch movies about journalism, especially investigative journalism, and one of my favorite movies is The Insider, which features Al Pacino as a professional investigative journalist. Hearing from an actual professional investigative journalist like Mark Schoofs, was like out of a movie. When Professor Schoofs spoke everyone leaned in and listened. One of my highlights of the week was raising my hand and noting that the interviewer (who Schoofs and the class were dissecting) waited to pull out his pen and paper so that he could gain this woman’s trust first. Professor Schoofs said it was a good point, which made my day.
Schoofs has been by far one of my favorite guest speakers. His words solidified my pursuit of becoming a professional journalist. Just from his speech alone, I started to view journalism as an important and practical job that discovers real truth in a world that tries to absolve powerful people from accountability. This lesson also ties into our conversation about youth civic engagement because I feel it is our responsibility as the future leaders of America to take matters into our own hands. We should pursue truth even if we think opposition, and even if we feel it isn’t easy to uncover. We must not let ourselves remain complicit in systems of injustice.
During this week, we also learned about the reparation of different ethnicities on screen. This is something I was particularly interested in since I have always felt like Asian Americans have usually been portrayed as a sidekick or a side character. What I think is also detrimental is that movies and TV shows portray conventional attractiveness as white and blonde. Growing up this hurt my confidence because I didn’t see Asian people as beautiful as I should have. I always felt like it made sense that the white character was pretty and the main character and the Asian guy were the nerdy less attractive sidekick. This caused some internalized racism, as I felt like I wasn’t the beauty standard, or I wasn’t ever attractive because I wasn’t white. One thing our class discussion touched on was that TV shows and Movies not only standardize white beauty but also appropriate ethnic culture to sell to a wide audience. For example, Fresh Off the Boat depicts a very stereotypical Chinese household, and on top of that, cast Japanese actors to play Chinese characters. As a Chinese person who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I felt it was insulting when the main character Louis tried speaking broken Mandarin to cover up the fact the actor was Korean.
Those were some of my main takeaways, but our journalism class also put together a Newscast, and filmed in the media center, which was an amazing experience. I also am glad that I have made some good friends along my journey here at AYA.
Communicating Change 