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.