Awarness

     So, it's my last week of my first here in the MSW program.  Yesterday I had a group presentation to do and well.... it was interesting.  It was for my diversity class.  I've enjoyed this class but there is SO much to look at and not enough time!  Even our group presentations that we've had to give, the subject matter is so deep that I feel that we have not been able to give it justice.
     This last presentation was that we had to pick a medium, along with 3 "ims" that are represented and do a PechaKucha presentation.  To put that type of a presentation in a nutshell, it's 20 slides, each slide you only spend 20 seconds on.  We picked music videos and lyrics with the 3 "ims" of sexism, classism, and heterosexism.  I had the task of discussion heterosexism.  It wasn't easy BUT I touched on how almost all videos depict a heterosexual couple, and then brought up all the negative/hateful homosexual lyrics out there along with one video that showed a lesbian couple.
     The lyrics I found were hateful!  They were terrible but when I found them I was like "these are great for the presentation".  Our intro was each of us had some lyrics and one of us in the group combined them so we had a dialogue of sort with the lyrics.  Reading these offensive words OUT LOUD in front of the class had me ill.  We did a disclaimer of sorts prior to the start of our presentation and went forth.
     Anyway.... any good education, I feel, needs to push one out of their comfort zone so you can have a dialogue about it and learn from it.  This presentation had me looking at music and the videos in a different way.  Where is that line of entertainment, creative freedom, and hate speech?  Why is it when a white artist badmouths the president or Wal-Mart there is a ban on them and removal of their CDs from the shelves but these same stores will sell CDs with hate lyrics thinking that by placing an "explicit lyrics" sticker on it distances them from the harm those lyrics do?  How can one be surprised by the rise of bullies and hateful rhetoric if it's in the song lyrics that kids sing a long to?

WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT THIS?  What am I doing about this?

     Well, I'm going to talk about to begin with.  Hopefully start at least one person to being more aware of music lyrics, and videos.... start the dialogue, start the awareness.

     One of the things that we talked about in our diversity class is institutional oppression.  How our government and institutions continue to oppress certain types of people.  Our country is run by old, white, christian men.  Anything that threatens the values of that group will be attacked and regulated BUT if it keeps the oppressed in "their place" nothing will be said or it will be excused in some way.  Looking back on the music industry.  A big corporation was called out, the artist was banned.  A group questioned the president, this group was shunned and their career tanked.
     There are hundreds of songs and videos objectifying women and bashing homosexuals and there is barley a blip of acknowledgement on this? When women are completely objectified it is excused by artistic freedom, that it empowers women, that these women are not being "forced into" doing those videos!  Rappers rap about beating homosexuals, there are songs about AIDS being from God, shooting a transsexual in the privates because it was the "right thing to do".  How are these songs being allowed?!
      It is being allowed because of institutionalized oppression, these words and these lyrics keep the white heterosexual god fearing man safe by letting this hate be passed on to other generations through "entertainment".  To think that these lyrics don't have any effect is naive.  Companies do research on how they can get the consumer to buy their product by subliminal messaging, to think that overt hateful lyrics have no fall out on the people that listen to them is naive.