After Sociology, who am I?

After experiencing this semester of sociology, I have become a more sociologically mindful person. I've learned a lot more about life and I would like to say I've learned a lot more about people as well. I've learned how I've subtly been shaped by society over the years, as well as how I've been impacted by culture and my social class. Like I mentioned in my very first blog, I'm a very determined girl striving for success. I learned that I've become determined and thirsty for acheivement because of how I've grown up. In an area where mostly everybody is upper class, successful people, I've become used to that type of lifestyle so I wouldn't really know how to live any other way. This has formed the idea in my head that success is important and something I need to accomplish. On a different note, sociology has made me more of a leader. I've come to care a lot less about caring about what other people have because it's grown less important to me. It actually annoys me when my friends care so much about material items and getting everything that they want. I do things the way I want to, regardless of what anybody else does or thinks. In general, I just became aware of how many things tie into affecting my life and who I've become and who I will later on be. So many things have seriously influenced me. Just the other day, while having a conversation with Mr. Salituro, he repeated the idea that what I've been through in life is going to forever influence and shape me. Aside from all this, I learned the values I've been taught and that deviance isn't always bad. All in all, I learned a lot in this class that will help define who I am and how I think. I could go on and on, but this would turn into a long blog. I really enjoyed taking this class and I think I may even want to minor in sociolgoy. I'm the same person as I was in the beginning, just a lot more sociologically mindful.

Race

This week we discussed race and learned that race is, infact, not a biological thing. Race is something that our society has created. We've been born and raised to learn what classifies someone as African American, Asian, Indian, Hispanic and so on. There's nothing different about these people biologically compared to White people. But what is different, is their skin color and the way that they look, which is why society has created names for these various groups of people and has classified them by their traits, etc. Growing up, most African American or Hispanic people that I heard of were not good people. I was sort of trained to think that they were the criminals of society and that they were the people to fear. Nobody trained me to think this way, but from movies and the media, it's something that I realized our society thought of them so I didn't know any better. These people were highly associated with crime. If you saw dark skin, your immediate reaction was supposed to be oh, he or she is bad so be careful. While it is true that many dark skinned people make up the population of people in poverty and crime related incidents, it's not fair for society to make such generalizations. I work at Kona Grill and I'm a hostess there. Since I began, I've met many of the hispanics that work in the kitchen and bus tables. When I would walk through the kitchen, I would unconsciously walk at a rapid pace because I was suspicious of them. I never realized that I was doing this until they started whistling at me and I realized I was scared of them. As time went on, I started to get to know them and learned that they are harmless. Many of them have families and work full time jobs to support them. They are really good people that don't deserve to be discriminated against. This opened my eyes to how society has made me think about people that aren't white and how it's not right to judge them. The hispanics are no different than me. They just happen to have darker skin and different looking features. A bit crazy to think about, but they're really no different biologically.

Monopobility

As we've been studying and as it's pretty obvious, the social class of our family is bound to determine the social class that we grow into. My grandparents were both part of the upper middle class. My grandfather was a lawyer and my grandma was a stay at home mother that watched over her four boys. My other grandfather was a business man and my grandma worked full time. My dad never went to college to earn a professional degree but he became lucky enough to start several of his own businesses and become successful at quite a young age. My mom on the other hand became an R.N. and went to Loyola University. So both of my parents that came from the upper middle class, moved on to attain their upper middle class status's. Because my parents had these resources available to them and had many opportunities in their childhoods to make something of themselves, they did. If my parents grew up in poverty, I can be sure that they wouldn't have become what they have today. My dad may have but otherwise my mom wouldn't have had the money to attend nursing school and college. And this cycle continues on to me and my siblings. We've all grown up in the northern suburbs where very little poverty exists. We've never had to worry about if we were going to be able to eat dinner or have heat in our home. We've all had our own bedrooms and have been very fortunate to live in the house that we do. My sister has gone on to graduate from the University of Illinois and now she's going to graduate school to become a Psychologist. While my brother is undecided with his life, he's still managing to get by. And me, I'm going to the University of Iowa to major in pre-med and then fulfill my dreams of becoming a doctor. The social class in my family has remained the same throughout the generations and I see myself passing this same social class on to my family in the future. This analysis of social class within my family has proved to me that social class has a lot to do with one's ancestors.

Social Class

For the past week, we've been discussing social class. And we've become aware of what types of things divide social class such as aquired tastes for clothes, foods, etc. One thing that came to mind for me while thinking about an example of this is the fact that people with low-incomes tend to eat at fast food restaraunts much more often than people with higher incomes. People with higher incomes can afford a nicer dinner than McDonald's so they typically don't crave that greasy food for dinner because they know they have many more options. Also, from the video, we became aware that once you've adapted to ways of a certain social class, nothing you do can or will change that. For instance that woman that got a make-over to attract wealthy older men. She still didn't know how to act and she just didn't seem right trying to be something that she clearly wasn't. Social class doesn't only become a way of dividing the rich from the poor, but it goes much deeper than that. It separates peoples actions and many specific things about their lifestyles.

Deviance/ 30 Days

Today in class we watched the show 30 days. Also, we learned about the shocking facts that America has the most amount of people locked up. This fact kind of scares me. While watching the show though, and taking into account that all of the men that were in the prison were there because of drug related crimes or because they were being "deviant" in other ways, I formed a strong opinion. I think that depending on what the crime was, by locking those guys up and resulting to prison, isn't helping them to better themselves. By making them suffer, that's not doing anything to help their problem.If anything, I think it's making matters worse. For those with drug problems and addictions, when they are put in prison, that's like adding oil to the fire. They are going through terrible withdrawal and when they get out and can finally get their fix again, they may turn into an ever bigger drug addict because they are so withdrawn. While it is important to crack down on people for drugs because of the drug epidemic and the severity of drugs, I think we should be more concerned about bringing these problematic people to rehab facilities where they can actually get help instead of throwing them behind bars. Even though people won't change unless they really want to, it could at least be a more effective approach to the problem of putting these people in a prison where they don't belong. They belong either in rehab or an institution.