#14

This week during Ideas of Antiquity, Alexia, Chisom, and Selam talked about The Color Purple, a classic film. In this film about women, it shows leadership in a different way than many of the other pieces we use to talk about leadership. Cellie, Sophia, and the rest of them aren’t in a position where they are trying to save someone else, go on a mission, or train for something special. This is a film about women and the struggles and challenges that they go through in their day to day life and shows us how leadership can happen on any occasion. The first key passage they used was of Cellie telling Harpo he should beat Sophia as a solution to her talking to him crazy. This scene in the movie shows where Cellie was at this point in the movie with her leadership development as well as how she found what she was going through normal and okay. While she may have had good intentions behind what she said this still was a moment of bad judgment. Her thinking it is okay to hit a woman can be an indicator of where her self esteem may be lying at this point in the movie along with other things and I believe that having high self-esteem is an essential part of being an effective leader because if you do not believe in yourself, how are you going to convince others to believe in you as well. Some things that I believe can help boost one’s self-esteem is to In my life, I have probably given bad advice, but I have definitely given advice when I was in a similar situation and wasn’t even listening to myself. When I did it I felt fraudulent, because how am I going to try to help someone else and not even listen to myself and not even be oblivious to the fact of that being what I was doing. In the second key passage, they chose where Sophia speaks to Cellie about her telling Harpo to beat her. I believe this moment of mentorship between Sophia and Cellie is one of the moments that had helped her in her leadership development because until Cellie was spoken to, she did not believe what she told Harpo to do was wrong. She was receptive to what Sophia was saying and used it to help her grow as a person. Sophia was feeling betrayed by Cellie and her having that open dialogue about how this action affected helped Cellie for sure. Personally, confronting a friend for me is difficult sometimes because I dislike confrontation but it is necessary sometimes to solve problems and I would rather solve a problem than not put myself in an uncomfortable situation that would benefit me in the end. Celie grows throughout the whole movie and doesn’t let her situations that she has gone through stop her from growing and moving forward. That is something I took from the movie because despite everything she still ended up in a better situation in the end. Another important moment in Cellies leadership development was her finding out her family lineage. Her finding out that her father is someone that she hasn’t met instead of the man that has been degrading her I believe is important because she is able to disconnect more from the situation that has been dehumanizing to her and grow apart from that. I’ve never searched into my family history, but recently I’ve been learning more about my ancestor’s spiritual ways from both my mothers and fathers side and it has helped me better understand myself a little more so I can understand to a very small degree how Cellie finding out about her actual family can affect how she views herself and what’s going on around her. While her findings impacted her leadership development, I don’t think I have gathered enough information for it to impact my leadership.