Who Am I After Sociology?

At the beginning of the year our first blog post was about defining ourselves as a person. My identity as a person hasn't been redefined, I feel that I am the same person I was before I took the class. Though the way I view the world around me has changed since the beginning of the year. I tend to think with a sociological imagination more often now. I question a lot of the things I see and try and figure things out by creating cause and effect scenarios that end with the event I question. Why does this person behave this way? How did this person end up like this? Why did this happen to me? I've began looking at class structure in society differently, as an invisible wall that separate people from interacting. Culture I now see as something that makes people unique. I've seen how the media can skew viewers opinions on topics and stretch truths. Mainly I've learned to notice the bad part of society. Though, by doing this I have greater appreciation of the good parts of society. Overall, I'm glad I had taken the class and I appreciate the fact that my out look on society has changed for the better.

Crash Again

This past week in class we watch the Academy Award winning film Crash written and directed by Paul Haggis. The film follows a number of characters each a different ethnicity/race. Throughout the film they cross paths with each other a number of times, during these interactions their racial prejudice is shown. Some of the characters resolve their problems by meeting each other like John Ryan did when he saved Christine from the car wreck, while others create more conflict like Tom Hansen did when he killed Peter. The film reveals real world problems that people in a diverse city like Los Angeles face, this was summed up by Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something". When someone doesn't interact with people of other races or ethnicities they tend to look towards stereotypes to define what a certain person is like. They tend to think all black people are hoodlums, all asians are smart, etc. The film addresses this by showing that stereotypes are completely irrelevant. At the beginning of the film Anthony is a no good person who steals cars and sells them to chop shops while, Cameron Thayer on the other hand is a successful law abiding television director, and both of them are black. Like world peace and ending world hunger I don't believe a completely tolerant society is possible but, we can make it better than it is now. Like previously mentioned people don't interact with others that are different then them, thats where the problem starts. If we were all raised around diverse people I think we would grow up without prejudices and overall this would somewhat resolve the problem. Unfortunately prejudice is passed down from generation to generation, racist parents cultivate these ideas in their children's minds before they are even allowed to make their own opinions. I think it will be a long time before we see any major step towards eliminating racism in our society.

Racism

Racism according to Merriam Webster is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Racism is a scar off the human condition, a taboo trait in society today. Though, this week in class we learned that we are all implicitly racist to one degree or another. We learned that we are raised to believe white is better than black. This was somewhat shocking to me but what was really interesting was that even african-american children are conditioned to believe white is better than black. That shows that racism and prejudice are cultivated on a subliminal level because even families that intentionally try to raise their families as tolerant and open minded end up with this seemingly inherent belief of "white is better than black." This supports my belief that getting rid of racism is an unrealistic goal. That no matter how hard we try to rid ourselves of this stain on humanity we may make some progress toward getting rid of it but we will never completely rid ourselves of it completely. Like my uncle who I mentioned in my blog many posts back, he was raised in a town with only people that looked like him. And when he went on a cruise later in his life he actually feared black people. He feared people different from him because he'd never seen someone different from him before the cruise. But people who grow up around diverse cultures do not have this excuse. And yet we still have people like the neo-nazis, white supremacists, and other groups who are backwards and need a scapegoat for their problems much like the nazis did 70 years ago. By spending their time hating they believe they are giving their pointless lives some false sense of meaning. Now I will sign off before I get into a ranting tirade.

Monopoly

This week in class we took a further look into the class system in American society. Specifically we looked at how difficult it is to move up in economic class and how people are usually stuck in the class they were born into. To do this we played the classic board game "Monopoly" but with a slight deviation in the rules. We had everyone divided into 5 economic levels: upper-higher class, lower-higher class, upper-middle class, lower-middle class, and working class. I ended up rolling a low number to begin with so I was stuck with lower-middle class. Even before the game began just looking at the rules I knew it would be impossible to make a decent amount of money from the lower classes point of view, and I was right. When the game ended I had barely made any money (maybe a hundred dollars more than I had started with) we thought the other lower-middle class person had made it big but it turns out it was just a blatant miscalculation. I enjoyed this lesson it was a good microcosm for the real world and a fun and intuitive way to teach it. Though, once again I ask, what can we do? I mean like I mentioned in previous blog posts we live in a nation with a capitalist economy. Its not like we will change it and we shouldn't. The system does seem to favor those who are born into riches but, it wouldn't be fair to just redistribute the wealth. That being said I do agree with the notion of the lesson, that we should appreciate more of what we do actually have and not focus on what we don't have.

"Honoring" the Working Class

In class last week, we took an in depth look at social classes in society. We watched a movie that took us into the lives of people from different classes and also saw how they interacted with each other and felt about each other. There were a few segments of the movie that showed people impersonating or "honoring" blue collar people. They did this by stereotyping them and acting like them. For example there was a "Hun Fest" held in Baltimore, and a couple of "yuppies" going to "dive bars" as they called them. After this though, they just went back to their normal lives, I did not see this as "honoring" the middle class. This is as I said before, stereotyping. They acted upon these stereotypes they've seen in pop-culture or that they've heard of and they believe that this gives them some sort character. Though, this is pure delusion, just because they impersonate someone doesn't give them character. They go back to their normal lives after shortly experiencing theirs' through stereotyping, this can be seen as offensive by people of the working class. Its just like me and my friends would impersonate our favorite characters from tv or film when we were children. We would wish to have certain traits that these characters had and acted like we did but in reality it was just false.

Money/Wealth in America

This week in class we talked about money and wealth in American society. We mainly focused on the fact that these things are not evenly distributed in America. This was something I suspected although, not to this degree. The fact that the top 10% of society has 72% of the wealth baffled me. Not only that but the top 1% of Americans owns 37% of the nations entire private wealth is ridiculous. According to this the top 1% has more wealth than the bottom 90%. I'd heard the phrase "The rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer" before but I did not know the rich were getting richer at such fast rate. And although these statistics may be shocking and may anger people, what are we supposed to do? We cannot just put shame on the people that have all of this money because a lot of them have earned it by working hard and applying themselves. Granted a lot of them have also just been born into such lives of luxury but we can't just take their money and distribute it more evenly, that wouldn't be right. These statistics are the consequences of a capitalistic nation and it is up to the people with the extraordinary amounts of wealth to decide on whether or not to donate a part of their money to charity.

Deviance in Society

When you think of deviancy you usually think of some illegal or evil act. In other words you think of deviancy in a negative sense. In class last week though we looked at deviancy in a positive sense. As an act of kindness that is outside of the norms of society. Things like helping an old lady cross the street, these acts really highlight the brighter side of human beings. In a culture that is over-saturated and emphasizes the darker side of humans in the media, it is both refreshing and sobering to hear of nobel acts of deviance. I vaguely remember someone's positive deviant act from years ago. When I was little, my mother took me with her to the super market and I walked off to find her a gift because her birthday was a few days later. When I found her gift and went to go pay for it the cashier told me I was short a few dollars, and to my surprise the cashier covered the amount I was short. This was not very meaningful to me until I remembered it years later, then I understood the gravity of the act. I realized how unusual what the cashier did for me was. And how it made me feel to be on the receiving end of the act showed me how rare and meaningful it really was.