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.