Final Blog Post

     My Genius Hour project and the last unit of culture and social stratification were very intertwined with each other, but the class in general really helped develop a new way of thinking that now leads me to question how my daily conflicts are a result of my society and how the conflicts of my society are a result of me and how what I value. It has  showed me that this idea of seeing, of vision, is just an illusion because even the things we think of as credible have latent functions. For example, the criminal justice system at first glance is seen as a system put in place to separate the criminals and protect everyone's in our society. But then if you look a little closer you realize that our mass incarceration system isn output if free labor and profit and how being a person of color is now equated to being a criminal. A society where saying your tough on crime is another way of perpetuating racial inequality and discrimination. I think that it has shown me that the only way to truly see and understand is to use my sociological imagination and find the connections between biography and history.
       Additionally, every unit has emphasized a part of the process that creates these multiple, shifting realities. The the first unit, I was just starting to grasp what sociology was and the Zimbardo experiment helped me recognize different ways a situation can see-through, but it also helped my conceive an idea of what not having a sociological imagination looks like and to what extent it provides understanding. By the second unit I wanted to just figure out how gender worked and what I found was a real life example of the importance of what we value being displaced and confine ourselves under over simplistic terms as a society. I always liked to think of gender as a sort of imitating game where everyone's endlessly trying to perform certain actions that are associated with their sex that can only be validated by other people in the game.This unit helped my sociological imagination expand to where I understood the the degree of it's effects and how it our importance on gender is a main cause of misogyny, rape culture, hyper masculinity, and homophobia. My genius hour project and the last unit just showed me the harsh reality that our society tries to conceal by implementing the American dream through socialization and how the reality most people face is seen as one they create out of personal incompetence, when in actuality poverty is bigger than just one person's individual choices and that it is both cyclical and cultural. Altogether, it creates this urgency for more people to develop sociological imagination and embodies the importance of questioning your reality.

Possible Solution

      So the solution I wanted to create had to be based on changing the way we socialize people in terms of social class. As you probably know, the main socialization factors are peers, family, school, and media, so I wanted to focus on one of these and try to change the existing process. I then started to think about what keeps people believing in the American Dream and I realized how big apart the media played. The media's what keeps the dream alive, with constant stories of people all of a sudden becoming rich and rising from poverty to the upper class all because of merit. These one hit-wonders are also brought out through tv shows and movies, so I decided to write a letter to one of the main network programs, NBC and just take a chance to make them aware  and see if it could cause any change. The letter I wrote had detailed explanation of the problem and the effects it causes and how their television programming helps perpetuate the problem and I specifically suggested if they  could be more conscious of how they depicted different social classes and how they portrayed social mobility. I think that if they start to put emphasis on the disadvantages flower socioeconomic classes and show how people can put huge amount of effort and still not progress upwardly because their circumstances and I think that will create a greater understanding and lower social stratification. It might also impact how many people try to help and change the structures in our society that makes upward social  mobility so scarce or at times not an option at all.

Explanation of Significance

   To start off, my question in itself is important because it questions the power we put on social class in our society and on how it is seen as a determining factor of the quality of life of someone. But another big part of it is that it is the explanation of why so many people see people who are in poverty as lazy or as a result of their own shortcomings. For example this idea of the American dream " 'that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one - if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God- given ability will take you.' This American ideology that each individual is responsible for his or her life outcomes is the expressed belief of the vast majority of Americans, rich and poor"( Lareau 9). Through this we can see that despite the unequal distribution of privilege and advantages, people still see the individual as  responsible for failing to progress upward. It is almost unbelievable, how we can see evidence of how big of a factor what social class your born into can de the " differentiating factor of how many advantages or disadvantages you have", but we still seem to blame the individual for not overcoming them, even if it has been proven that the social class you have been born into is the one that you'll likely die in and that social mobility has nearly flatlined. The way we are socialized to believe in the American dream and develop individualistic mindsets, does not change the inequity the poor suffer but it could change how we think of the poor, as either victims to  a lack of effort or as victims of circumstance, it could also determine if we socially stratify them at all.

Race

      Race is defined as a "socially constructed category of people who share biologically transmitted traits that members of a society consider important". Not only does this definition state that race is a social construct, but it recognizes that the way we do that, is by giving race so much importance and power over how we define someone. At first I thought that there had to be some type of biological aspect if we were to give it that much importance, but I was left to find that so many people use this claim that race is biological, to justify the inequalities based on race. Throughout this  unit I have learned that people in power have taken advantage of the vulnerable, which in this case is the people of color, to further their own personal agendas. In order for someone to have power, someone else has to have less and race is a great example of this. But since being outwardly racist is no longer accepted as we saw in the 'New Jim Crow', people in power have to find subtle ways to discriminate based on race, but by calling it something else, like tough on crime, it is then accepted and the oppression continues. To start I think that race is socially constructed through the media and it starts by taking the humanity away from the people of color in order to make it easier for everyone to not have compassion for them and see people of color as the problem that everyone has to defend themselves against. When your instilled with the messages that people of color are innately inferior, you no longer see POC as human and it's easier to see them have their rights being taken way and see it as justifiable because they're inferior, but the idea of pigment being used as a basis for inferiority is a reality we, as a society have created. As was seen in the documentary. the 13th, the media over represents black people as criminals  and then when we label someone a criminal, we " discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans". This representation of POC, specifically African americans as savages makes inequalities justifiable and correlates this idea of 'whiteness' with superiority. Another significant factor with how race is socially constructed are the institutions and the structures we put in place in our society that keep POC down. The criminal justice system being one of them, but not the only one, it all comes down to an unequal distribution of power and resources. Obviously there are intersections between social class and race, but by creating more disadvantages for people of color through denying the same access to education, healthcare, housing and jobs, you validate the mindset that is used to gain from racism. The mindset that has opportunities and advantages because of inherited privilege and then when they succeed they call it effort. The mindset that see's any one else's inability to succeed as a lack of effort and doesn't take into consideration the disadvantages they were born into. Adding on, the way people of color are represented on tv shows has a huge role because of the endless hours people spend sitting in front of a tv absorbing messages and   further developing biases and stereotypes. Through the activity of race and media I came to realize that we give writers who write these shows the power to depict the mannerisms of people of color and white people and when someone's only representation of a POC is a misrepresentation from the media, then a stereotype becomes their beliefs. I think the affect of this can be shown by simply showing the state of our country and how our current leadership has forged it's success on this hatred of minorities and validation of inferiority.
         Overall, learning about race and the criminal justice system has only deepened the importance of  a sociological imagination for me, because it just shows how the problems we face daily are deeply connected with what our world values  and the means they go to get it. For example, the problem of discrimination against people of color is connected to how people in power value money and increasing their power , specifically the people who gain from having free labor through the incarceration systems and go to extreme means to associate being bad or a criminal with  being a person of color, in order to get more people of color in their jails working for free and thus boosting their power. In one of our first documents called the sociological imagination claimed that " It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the two" and I think this is like the connection of our criminal system to the devaluation a person of color faces. I also have came to a realization that the what we call reality and what we see as truth is something that we construct, through the help of society, whether it's through media,family, peers or school, if you don't question or are aware of the messages that are being instilled in you, then your perspective is not your own, but what society has deemed it to be. I think that that also plays into what the solution to these problems of race and racial inequality are, which is questioning those preconceived notions of people of color based on constructions imposed from the outside. I think a start would be to recognize you may have an implicit bias towards black people as bad and to try and contest that bias and look at more successful and good black people to form a new association. As soon as we start seeing people of color as humans and not savages then despite media and societal structures, we will not only take what society is trying to tell us about people of color and see it as truth. Then soon after this false reality we created is questioned then we will soon find the people in power being replaced with people with this new questioning mindset and our societal racism will be deconstructed.

What is the specific problem? Why does this problem occur?

    My genius hour project has to do with socialization, specifically focused on social class and how the structure of our social class perpetuates inequalities , so then the problem is that depending on what social class you are a part of, one may have more advantages than other people. The extent of inequalities created by social class goes into the quality of a person's education, their occupation and overall stability, how vulnerable someone is to having a crime record and someone's self esteem. The problem occurs because we see social class as a way to define who a person is or how valuable they are , so if you come from a lower social class you are only taught hoe to follow orders versus the elite class that is taught to think creatively and voice their opinions, so this then plays into the job they get later in life and they face so many disadvantages that compared to higher social class they are raised to fail and never have the opportunity to the same quality of life that the higher social classes experience. On of my sources called "Social class and Education" has recognized social class as "a differentiating factor in the distribution of rewards and punishments in our society... Housing seems to be one of these, and medical treatment, and income, as well as educational opportunity", This not only shows that social class is a problem, but it emphasizes the amount of importance, social class plays into all other aspects of life. Although I haven't thought of a solution for this problem, because i don't know how realistic it would be to get rid of social class altogether, but maybe a good start would be to stop socializing people based simply on what social class they 'belong' to or a solution that decreases the gap or disadvantages between the high and low social classes. Another big step would be to deconstruct this idea that social mobility is always an option and if one does not transcend to a higher class then it the individual's fault instead of the society and the systems that come along with it, that created these circumstances that are preventing them from upward mobility.

15 SOURCES

Jensen, Arthur R. "Social Class, Race, and Genetics: Implications for Education." American Educational Research Journal 5.1 (1968): 1-42. JSTOR. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: U of California, 2011. Print.

Raths, Louis. "Social Class and Education." The Journal of Educational Sociology 28.3 (1954): 124-25. JSTOR. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

Gecas, Viktor. "Social Class, Occupational Conditions, and Self-Esteem." Sociological Perspectives 32.3 (1989): 353-64. JSTOR. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

Sumner, Kandice. "How America's Public Schools Keep Kids in Poverty." Kandice Sumner: How America's Public Schools Keep Kids in Poverty | TED Talk | TED.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017. 

Socialization and Gender

      To start off I want to define what gender is versus what we have made it out to be. Throughout many readings and definitions, I have realized that gender is something that we have given importance to and has no origin, but it is made out to be something that is fixed like sex, when it actually isn't. Gender is "an achieved status: that which is constructed through psychological, cultural, and social means"(Doing Gender 175). We, as a society, construct this reality of gender, we participate in this imitating game by consciously trying to live up to these expectations that we have assigned to each sex and in turn that creates a society that is based on segregation and seclusion and grows on an individual's self-doubt. Although in recent years we have progressed in terms of seeing sex and gender as two different forms of identity, we are still constantly "creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential  or biological"(Doing Gender 178). This cycle is perpetuated through many forms which includes, family, school, peer groups and mass media, they all play a part into why people base their potential on how good their performance of gender is. For example, when a couple has a baby, the first thing relatives or even the couple ask is "Is it a boy or a girl?", which not only shows how much we value 'gender', but looking into why they specifically asked this question, the ways we raise each sex are based on this instilled belief that men represent dominance and women represent deference. Imagine if the couple would have said the baby was a girl and the amount of pink items that would have rolled through the door versus if the couple said it was a boy and the amount of blue items. Or looking back to a child's book titled "I'm Glad I'm a Boy, I'm Glad I'm a Girl" where it creates a sense of weakness versus strength, socializing girls by telling them they depend on boys and are only needed for domestic roles, which then creates barriers on what you can accomplish based solely on your gender. But the messages we send out about gender also directly affect our personalities, which based on the textbook definition is a person's consistent patterns of acting, thinking and feeling that develop through social experience and by internalizing surroundings. If we are surrounded by a society and people who as soon as someone comes out of the womb  and throughout the rest of one's life  we are categorizing them  and imposing upon them the belief that the way people perceive you can either increase your security or cause you to be stratified , then we are naturally going to internalize gender as something that defines us and instead of having the freedom to be who you are, you start to adapt to the environment in order to be socially accepted. Through this process you start to constantly be afraid of doing something that isn't approved as what your gender 'would do' and start to put on a performance for peer groups and throughout school in order to live up to the expectation of who you are suppose to be. But throughout the act of trying to gain social acceptance, we put people down and point out their own straying behaviors in order to elevate ourselves and gain approval of peers. This is tied to the reading about manhood and how men use women and other groups of men to gain approval from men on the level of manliness they embody, but the problem with that is that there is no original person or idea that is the complete embodiment of gender so the cycle is never ending because the end is not defined. This then leads to endless individuals always living with the sense of no control and placing a great amount of value on appearances and on what people own versus someone's character. Since we define men as powerful, the way we insult men is to emasculate them and all the insults are directly related to being a women, which then perpetuates misogyny by associating weakness with women and men, who are focused on self- image, do not want to be anything like a women and that lead to the hatred of women. Other effects of this process of exclusion is over-sexualization, rape culture, the man-box, bogy- image issues, the acceptance of violence, homophobia, and racism because since men are expected to not show vulnerability and are encouraged to prove there dominance this creates the ma-box and also leads to the usage of women as currency, which then implies the idea that women are simply "body props" that have to objectify themselves in order to have power and that their only value is found in how desirable they are to others.The media also plays a big part because through the news, commercials and tv programs they are portraying through sexualized themes,so females do not get any messages that are saying they don't have to use sexuality to be empowered and then leads to the normalization of rape because they blame it on women for simply applying the messages they absorbed and men's need to prove their dominance.But the way men use other men to reach 'manhood' is through comparison and that includes not wanting to be perceived as gay so they put them down and through stereotypes of different races they also put down men of color. Also, the media has commercials of males being aggressive and violent which confirms the expectations od dominance, but encourages for dominance to increase to a greater magnitude that includes defaulting to physically assaulting anyone that challenges them. All of these problems were created by society because we don't see people, but it is always a man and woman interaction were we assess people and decide, based only on face value, if they fit the expectations of gender, we give importance to gender by seeing it as a means to assure security.
         In the beginning of this unit , I recognized that gender and the expectations that came along were a huge problem in how we value people, but I hadn't realizing how the simple interactions I have, perpetuate this idea of segregation. My sociological imagination has expanded to not only include me thinking about connections between an event to other ideas, but to see my personal problems to occur because of the problems with society. The reason people, including me, have so many problems with assigning so much value to how we look or our self confidence issues is because we were taught that the way other people thought of us was were our value resided and that physicality was more important than character. But it also let me make more connections of how institutions that hold power have perpetuated the importance we play on gender, simply with the girl and boy bathrooms built in every building that force you to pick one binary , this was an example from 'Doing Gender' or how simply walking through a door that a male opened for you is a confirming the expectations we associate with sex. Now I at least will be aware of what society is telling me and analyze it instead of consciously or unconsciously internalizing it and not taking any personal struggles of stratification or segregation personally and blaming it on who I am, but as a result of the society I live in, it will give my some social mindfulness, so I can take step back and not see a situation as right or wrong.But, I don't know if problems with gender stratification and gender discrimination can be solved, because it's impossible to not do gender, but since we give gender the importance, what if we took that importance away. and then we wouldn't always be assessing people's 'essential nature' to decide what gender they belong in. We have to change the way we socialize people because socialization is basic to human development, but the way we socialize people to base their potential on how good their performance of gender is and our idealization of feminine and masculine natures, needs to change. In order to take away the importance of gender we have to socialize people to put less importance on the self, the part of the personality composed of self-awareness and self image, so that people aren't always focusing on perceptions and the approval of others. I think a big part of fixing these problems is to educate people and discredit the expectations linked with each sex, so people can be who they are and put less significance on power.