Project Remix: Critical Dialogues

By Kelly Kinas ‘17

What happened over the summer? Maybe you danced, maybe jived, maybe you had the time of your life. But other than that ABBA reference, a lot of significant events occurred that will change the way most people think and talk about issues. 

Project Remix is a part of Together USC and tries to start important dialogues on campus which can result in important steps towards a more educated, socially-conscious student body.

The first topic of the night was Donald Trump.

Yeah it’s a sad day because there are some people out there who support Trump to be the next President of the United States.

Our first conversation of the night was about Donald Trump and how he said some racist remarks to a Univision reporter at one of his press conferences. Most of what we talked about was how Trump is an actual, real candidate for president. We talked bout how he is a celebrity and how no one to take seriously and yet here we are. He’s running for president. 

I spoke up and talked about how I wasn’t surprised that Trump was racist. It’s expected. That should not be an expectation of a Presidential candidate, in my opinion.

Next was the Charleston Shooting.

This is never an easy topic to talk about but the frequencies of these shootings makes them a necessary dialogue that we all need to talk about, no matter how sad or uncomfortable we feel.

For this dialogue, we discussed how the media handled the Charleston shooting. The media again only focused on the shooter, calling him a troubled child, instead of truly discussing the implication of race and white supremacy that the shooter displayed on his blog.

We viewed and honored the victims and discussed how we all found out about the shooting. Mine was through twitter, tumblr, and a group chat with my friends. How we understand and get information about important events has changed. 

Next we discussed Caitlyn Jenner and Marriage Equality.

Two very large events this summer were Caitlyn Jenner coming out as transgendered and the Supreme Court voting for Marriage Equality for the  LGBT community. 

Of course, we can’t just talk about happy stuff like this. Instead, we talked about Caitlyn’s view on marriage equality. Before her transition, Caitlyn was very conservative, against gay marriage like many of republicans. But after her transition, did anything change?

It’s an interesting question. Just because she came out, does that mean she HAS to change her opinion on gay marriage? She could be gay or straight now but does that necessarily mean that her political standpoint needs to change?

As a group, we decided that this is a form of hero-worship. We want Caitlyn to be all we could ever want in an advocate and we’re not seeing her as a person. She might not change her opinion yet but we can’t expect her to be everything we could possibly want. We should allow her political-fluidity, to give her time to change her beliefs if she wants to.

Lastly, we discussed Rachel Dolezal.

This always makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t know how to define this. Through Project Remix, we discussed that Rachel decided to just the phrase “transracial”, which made a lot of people mad. The term “transracial” is most often used for people who were adopted into a family of a different race. These people feel that Rachel is using the term incorrectly.

Can someone be “transracial”? Can you be born the wrong race? I believe yes. I feel like people can but what the Project Remix discussion debated was were people upset because she is claiming to be black? Or are they upset because she lied about being black?

I feel like I am most upset about her lies. You can be a part of the NAACP without being black. While she has the right to identify in whatever way she wants, she cannot walk around saying a black man is her father when he is not. If she came out as transracial before she joined the NAACP, it might have been more powerful that she became president. Unfortunately, in my opinion, she became president because of a lie and that is not okay.

How do you talk about issues? Do you feel like you actually know about what happened or do you only know what the media tells you?

These are important questions and you should definitely come to the next Project Remix dialogue. You can find out.

Fight on!