Until we give them eyes to see (the value of diversity)

****I am working on a project and found this unpublished article I wrote years ago. I'm publishing this unfinished post now so I can put it in a folder to revisit in the future, assuming no-one is still around on this long abandoned webpage to see it!****

I was listening to a podcast this morning. It's called "Gravy" and it's produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, Mississippi. I love it for a few reasons. The first, if I'm honest, is because the podcast is hosted and frequented by Mississippi residents and I will always and forever think that only people in my home state know how to talk right. The other things I love about "Gravy" are the tendency for the topics to revolve around Southern culture, food, and systems and history of injustice in the South. These are a few of my most passionate interests. Also, the soundtrack is always spot on.

The episode I listened to this morning originally aired on October 18, 2018, and is titled "The Swamp Witches." The reporter spends a weekend with a group of women in the Mississippi Delta. That's in central Mississippi, where cotton plantations used to rule, and the racial history is harrowing. Third world poverty was prevalent until the sixties and still exists in some corners today. I grew up ignorant about much of this, and it wasn't until I watched an episode of "Oprah" as a teenager and she visited families with children suffering from pellagra, an illness brought on by severe rarely seen in developed countries.

This podcast is not about that, though. This podcast is about a group of women defying stereotypes by regularly going out to a hunting camp, donning camo, and hunting ducks all weekend long. They often meet male hunters who find their group amusing. They've even been asked if they even need a license to hunt, as if they aren't expected to actually kill anything, the men not realizing that these women are expert hunters who regularly kill their legal limit of ducks every day on their weekends out. They've even been asked if they even need a license to hunt, as if they aren't expected to actually kill anything. It all started when Allison Crews auctioned off a hunting lesson that resulted in a friendship, and the group grew from there.