#Askhermore at the Oscars

This year at the Academy Awards, there was a a movement called #AskHerMore, started by Amy Poehler's Smart Girls earlier this year for the Golden Globes.
The gist of it is to have the interviewers ask the actresses questions about more than just their dresses and makeup and accessories.
It should be simple enough but it's received backlash. I've seen several comments from both men and women saying that the actresses wear fancy dresses for a reason.

Yes, I can see a reason for acknowledging the designer of the dress. Dozens of people worked to put together the ensemble we end up seeing on the red carpet and they should be acknowledged.

I want to write about beauty and fashion and get paid to do it. I think that there is a field for this and there are people interested in what or who celebrities are wearing but I also think that there are dozens of fashion and beauty bloggers/writers dedicated to covering this. Even ones who communicate with the stylists of the celebrities. So reporters for ET or E! or whoever can DEFINITELY focus their attention to asking these actresses questions of the same caliber they do the actors. 
I don't understand why people are so against this movement. There isn't going to be a shortage of fashion and beauty coverage, believe me. You've got People, People Style Watch, Glamour, Marie Claire, Lucky, Allure, Elle, Vogue, and all the gossip magazines with full spreads dedicated to the dresses and the shoes and the lipstick and the hair and the jewelry.

Asking the stylist who did the dress and asking the actress what the most challenging thing was shouldn't be mutually exclusive. 
This video shows the ridiculous questions actresses are asked on the red carpet. From "Who are you wearing?" to "Did you wear undergarments?" they make these women out to be nothing more than walking trophies.

Like I said, I can see that there is an interest in fashion and beauty. There are publications devoted solely to it. Let's let them focus on that and allow other publications to focus on the people themselves and the work they do.

What's In a Name?

When I was younger, I wanted my name to be Veronica or Vivian. My mother had the name Brittany picked out before I was even thought of so I would always have the name Brittany, though. My last name is Fholer, pronounced like Kohler but with an F. The number of teachers and just people in general who have mispronounced it, either when trying to read it or after hearing me say it, is too many to count. If I had a dollar for every time my last name was mispronounced, I might be able to pay for textbooks or a portion of my tuition and fees here at UNT.

 In one of our classes, someone brought up the guy named Jose who dropped the "S" from his name on job applications. His last name is Zamora. Jose Zamora couldn't get a response back but Joe Zamora could. The power that a first name has. Someone mentioned that they knew someone who named their daughter a certain name because she wanted her to be employable.

I can't fathom ever planning my child's name around that. I thought I understood having a hard to pronounce name and the repercussions of that. I realize though that this is nothing compared to what other people have to go through.

The whole topic of names, and specifically names in the African-American community, made me think of Quvenzhane Wallis, from Southern Beasts in the Wild and Annie, and Uzo Aduba, from Orange is the New Black. 

Quvenzhane is pronounced Kwuh-Venn-Zhuh-Nay. She's currently 11 years old but when she came into the spotlight, she was around 8 or 9. The first part of her name, Quven, is a mix of her parents' names- Qulyndreia and Venjie, while, "zhane" is Swahili for "fairy". The hate and animosity she's received because of her name, and the number of adults who have made fun of her name, is alarming. She isn't the only child in the U.S., or the world, with a unique name.

Uzo Aduba's full name is Uzoamaka Nwaneka  Aduba. She told Seth Meyers a story about her wanting to change her name when she was little (starting around 1:04).

 

She wanted to change her name to Zoe because Uzoamaka was difficult to pronounce. Her mother told her, "If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky, and Michelangelo, they can learn to say Uzoamaka."
It's the perfect come back, in my opinion, to any argument about a name that might be more difficult to pronounce.

I think race plays a part in this conversation, obviously. The idea that there are black parents who are torn on whether to give their child an African name with wonderful meaning or give them a white sounding name so they can fit in isn't right. Brittany means "Of Britain." There is no meaning to that name, and there's not really anything wrong with choosing a name because you like the sound of it. But when people are looked down upon because their name, which was likely chosen because it has a bigger meaning, then it becomes an issue.


I think one way to help this is to recognize that there are celebrities who aren't changing their names to make them easier to pronounce, as shown in this link.
 

Race, Gender and Media: Stereotypes and Schema

I must admit that I already have somewhat of an awareness of gender and race and representation, albeit a fairly recent one (it's only been since high school and up so about eight or nine years, but more concretely four years or so). I am especially interested in representation in politics.

I identify as a feminist and as a more liberally minded person, which drives my Fox News watching, conservative, white, middle-aged man of a father crazy. He actually unfriended me on Facebook because I kept posting links and sharing posts that he didn't agree with (aka that weren't from Fox News or The Blaze or other like-minded conservative media).

I think the reason I have these views is 1) because I took an Old and New Testament class the same semesters I took American Government classes, and during election season and 2) because I am a woman who was raised by a single working mother.

In our first class, we discussed schemas and stereotypes and something that popped into my head was a conversation I had with my father, in the IHOP by UNT, about police and minorities and about Wendy Davis being labeled as Abortion Barbie (which is apparently not normal breakfast conversation material, if the looks I got from neighboring tables were anything to go by).

It was right before the grand jury returned no indictment for Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown and my dad, being a retired police officer, sided with the police side while I, being someone who could admit there was corruption among police and saw various reports and eyewitness tweets and statements over discrepancies in the events leading up to the shooting and the investigation afterwards, sided with the other side.
My dad worked as a cop for 20-plus years, almost 30 years, in Killeen, Texas.
Google Killeen. I swear, no one actually likes living there, they just do it because it's cheap or because they work there. It's the 21st most populous city in Texas and has a racial makeup of 45% white, 34% black, 22% Hispanic/Latino and the rest being Asian or Native American or "Other."
The police force of Killeen is actually more diverse than that of Ferguson and the relationship between KPD and the residents of Killeen is much much better than that of FPD and Ferguson residents.

I'd been told many times before by my dad or my mom about my dad that he dealt with a lot of "shady" people and other criminals, who happened to be black, thus shaping his view on a certain "type" of black person. The only thing my dad said about Killeen was that it was ghetto and full of ghetto people. My understanding is that if a black person acts the way a white person would act, he has no problem with them. The moment they delve from the approved behavior, his disdain shows, if not publicly then privately.

On the other hand, he's talked about how one of the best police officers he's ever had the pleasure of working with was a woman. A black woman. A black woman who was gay. It sounds to me like that fallback that people have to prove they aren't racist, "My best friend is black!"

It was interesting to hear about schemas and stereotypes, especially with recent events, because I think a lot of times when talking to people about these news events, there are those who think all black men are "thugs" but when a white person does the same thing or worse, kills a bunch of people, they are labeled as a troubled soul. It's actually disheartening and frustrating to see.