When Dr. Georgia Dunston, Ph.D., the Director of Molecular Genetics and the Chair of the Department of Microbiology in the College of Medicine at Howard University, came to present to the freshman, she was unable to get to her slideshow but she did give a great presentation. She discussed the genome, and how this entity contains an organism’s hereditary information, which gives them their ‘uniqueness’. She expressed how the genomes within all of us make us different, individually, but that we are all still connected; we are a family connected by history. Yet we cannot solely define ourselves by our skin color; we represent culture, history, knowledge, struggle, freedom of speech, etc.
During her speech, Dr. Georgia M. Dunston stated that “we [this generation] are the answers to someone’s prayers”, because our ancestors struggled from slavery to the March on Washington to Board vs. Education, so that we could have equal rights in America and be attending schools and universities such as Howard University. She expressed to us that to find our own identity “we must first know where we’ve been, to know where we are going.” We must revisit our history, look at the progress our ancestors made, and we must have hope that we can make similar, if not better, advancements in society, if we all work together in the future and not tear other blacks down when they are succeeding. We need to find our purpose: our reason to be, and with the knowledge of our history, we should be able to create our own story.
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