Bringing it all together - The final blog

I almost didn't take soc, I almost took food prep, and I'm happy with the decision I made. Sociology has opened my mind to things that I'd never thought about before: all the influences I have, the existance of a class system in America; the idea of time in other countries. So many things I would have never considered to be an important factor in my life, I learned about in soc. So many things control the way I am today to the smallest detail about which type of bread I like to something broader like what I want to do with my life. So looking back on it, why am I such a calm person? It's easy to say it's just the way I am, but it's more than that. My dad prides himself in his handywork around the house: he installs light switches, wires together entertainment systems, builds our computers, and keeps little things organized. I think a big part of my personality comes from him. I have fond memories of sitting on his lap and playing car racing games on the computer. Whenever he starts a big project around the house, he recruits me to help out and explains everythign. So what if my dad wasn't good with his hands or had no electrical knowledge? Would I be an entirely different person? What if he loved hockey and not baseball? These are the kinds of things that sociology has opened my mind to, and I feel like I look at the world in a higher sense of conciousness.

Crash

Crash is about implicit racism in our diverse country. In the movie there were the Blacks, the Asians, the Whites, the Middle Eastern, and the Hispanics. Each group was profiled and stereotyped in different ways. Sal brought up the point about what we learn about the Asian man at the end of the movie, that he's trafficking people. As a society, we typically view Asians in a positive stereotype. The two Black guys who were stealingcars were even discussing how they were being profiled and that the White woman walked closer to her husband when they got closer. Ironically, the two black men jacked the couple's car. Later in the movie, Terrance Howard's charcter, Cameron, tells Ludacris' charcter (Anthony) that he embarassed both of them. I think what he's trying to say is that Anthony slipped into the black stereotype when he should be trying to stay away from its negative ideas. The best way to reduce racism in our lives is to just be open minded and ignore sterotypes.

Race is socially created

I found it really interesting that in a foreign country, people actually applied to legally change their race. While this doesn't initiallly make sense in America, race is a social construction. We discussed the possibility of someone's race changing on an airplane because different cultures interpret races differently. If skin color is an indication of race than it's certainly hard for people to determine what race I'm part of, especially if you throw my last name in the mix. Some say Hispanic, some say Black, some say Middle Eastern; hardly anyone gets my true origins right and says Russian. While race has never directly affected me, I've witnessed and been a part of stereotyping based on race during track season. We all expect the Black kids to run the fastest and be the best athletes, but why? Is it their race, their heritage, their nationality? None of it really, becase race is a social construction and doesn't determine what kind of person or athlete you are.

I never want to go to jail

Jail is a terrible place to end up; especially more than once. But that's how our prison system usually works. Instead of assisting inmates to turn their life around, our jails are just making more criminals. The implementation of strict drug laws got the ball rolling for overpopulated and underfunded jails. Are these laws really fair? We discussed in class that the laws for crack cocaine are much much stricter than powder cocaine. The answer is obvious; crack is much more deadly that powder. But if you look deeper, crack is cheaper and powder is considered the "rich man's" cocaine. So it turn, the government's laws are putting poor people in jail because they can't afford powder cocaine. The real cynics argue that it's all a conspiracy to put urban minorities in jail. Regardless, jail is a horrible place to be and our system really needs to be fixed up.

Wealth & Social Class

The class system of America isn't fair. Playing Monopoly today in Soc we used a different set of rules. At the beginning of the game, each person rolled a set of dice to determine which class they would be, similar to the randomness when you're born into a class. I rolled into the highest class, old money, and started the game off with the most money and the most properties. As the game went on, I could tell I had a substantial advantage over everyone else because I could buy everything I landed on and was collecting money before anyone had gotten a property. Is the "real world" really like this? It's tough to tell because we don't live in the uber wealthy, but in our upper-middle class society, everyone is on a pretty even playing field and it's tough to see who's wealthy. While playing I observed that it was very hard for the players in the lowest classes to do much of anything besides lose money. Is our society really structured like this? Is it at all fair for it to be easy for the richer to get richer and the poor to get poorer? In the Land of Opportunity, it seems nearly impossible to start from the bottom and really make your way up to the upper classes of society.