Stop The Verbal Violence PSA - Barbara Jordan

This is the second PSA with Barbara Jordan knocking the stuffing out of the inarticulate comment. I've had to sift through a lot of comments to find the ones that are clean enough to put up as an representative examples.



A lot of people still hold this woman in high regard. She may have left the planet but thankfully people have been posting her words, audio and video.

• University of Texas Archive on Barbara Jordan
• American Rhetoric has the video of the full speech with a transcript.
• University of Texas interview with Professor Jordan
  

Process:

The tools I used were photos, mp3 audio and a video software editing program called Serif Movie Plus X3. It made it really easy to pan, zoom and keep the aspect ratio correct. You can do the same thing in Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. Corel VideoStudio 12 has that feature as well.

Serif gives me a good balance between my intermediate video skills and access to advanced features, if I need them.

Inspiration and Reason for this PSA Video:

There is some nasty, vile stuff and a some of it is coming from young African-American men.

Seriously. Those that posted their ages seem to range from 18 t0 25 or so. There is some older male commentary as well but it is coming from young men. And Fox News. And cable reality shows. I can go on.

Let me get back to the young men thing for a moment. I seem to remember something about there are stages of development. There is a phase in some young boys around seven or eight start to "hate" girls. They are learning to construct their own identities independent of mom and the culture tells them that they are "different" than girls.

Then puberty hits and 9 out 10 of them like girls very much. Well, parts of them anyway. There is a later adolescence phase where some men lock into self-esteem by exerting mental and/or physical power over women.

Not saying they are actually abusing - though that is happening; but that internally they cannot be a man without disrespecting women. The are supported in that thinking by the church, images from the dominate culture and lack of seeing other types of women. A potion of these men never leave that stage.

Who performs rap music? What do lower skilled performers rap about? What has been programmed into our childrens' heads for the past 30 years?

I am not bashing rappers. I want to make that clear. When rap music started out there was a diversity in voices and approaches. You had political, comedy, gospel, women and a range of performers.

When the music companies came and stated waving big money in folks faces that when it changed. The industry focused in on a certain demographic that would pay for gangster, drugs and negative empowerment. Misogyny is a multi-billion dollar industry.

In my opinion.