Soledad O'Brien's Advice for Students that Dream

By Shamoni Sarkar on November 27, 2012

Soledad O’Brien at Mount Holyoke College

When Soledad O’Brien walked to the podium in Chapin Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College, radiating confidence and focus, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the rest of the talk. Were we going to get a truthful account of how she survived racism, advice on how to make it big as a journalist, or what the many difficulties are that women face as professionals? I think I was expecting a standard, impersonal account from a famous public figure. O’Brien did talk about the things I imagined she would, but not in the way I expected. It wasn’t really about racism directed at herher experience as a reporter, or her life as a woman professional. Rather, she used her personal stories to say something about the bigger issues— she spoke to us about Racism, Journalism and Women.

One of the most astounding revelations she made early on was about how she dropped out of Harvard University to get her first job “removing staples off the walls” in a big media company. The point of this was to tell us to take risks to get to where we wanted. If we waited for people to give us permission (or approval) to do what we wanted, we might be waiting a long time. Her parents (her father is Australian and her mother Cuban) defied the rules of society and the law itself to find a way to get married and start a family before interracial marriages were legalized in the United States. Soledad O’Brien inherited rebellious genes. And she knew all along that in order to do what she wanted, she couldn’t try and fit into a box of collective expectations. When a story she had proposed to do on the Taliban in Afghanistan was approved but given to a male reporter because she was pregnant, she found a way to travel to Afghanistan to cover the story independently.

At the Q&A session, the general question on most people’s minds was Why do you do what you do and how do you never get tired and cave in? O’Brien didn’t have an answer she could articulate right away, but she said that at a basic level it was because she was just compelled by human stories, and she always looked out for ways to tell them. Earlier in the lecture she had said that America’s claim to power shouldn’t be simply having the fastest growing demographics of a particular population (in this case the Latino/a population), but rather the potential ability to leverage that demographic. As a citizen of this country and a product of all the challenges (and benefits) it had thrown at her, O’Brien had managed to leverage herself and her life. Her message to us was just that— take a stand, and do the most with what you have and what you’ve been given, even if that means sometimes getting angry and offending people.

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