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.