Last blog: Prostitution.

I have heard that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world. The majority of people abhor it; in fact, it is outlawed in many countries; yet it happens right under our noses. I always view prostitution in terms of willing buyer and willing seller terms, unless the prostitution is not voluntary.

In her article, Melisa Farley’s talks about why prostitutes end up doing what they do: many of them were sexually abused when they were children. It makes sense that they would suffer PTSD because the experience is traumatic, and reminds them of the abuse they went through. 

Race & ethnicity

Am very glad that we did not write a blog about Class and Global Inequality because I would not know what to write under Race and Ethnicity, because class is very important when analyzing race and ethnicity. No matter what race one is, if he or she belongs in the lower and underclass, he or she starts at the bottom of the ladder in all spheres of life.

Throughout the semester we have been talking about ideologies that support inequality and the power that the dominant groups have in shaping what the rest of the population thinks and does. From the start, the people who have power have defined race to suit their interests, and ensure that they do not have any competition from minorities. Victims of this power structure continue to suffer to this day.

Political and social functions of color-blindness ideology

I chose to read the article about color-blind privilege because it talks about ideology that promotes the notion that it is not a racist world anymore and everyone has an equal shot of fulfilling his or her dreams. Charles Gallagher starts his article by noting that big corporations have advertisements that feature people of all colors; these ads point to the illusion that all races have equal standing (1). The realities on the ground do show a very different picture. I watched a documentary called The Corporation that talked about how corporations rule the world; they go wherever there is money, and craft advertisements to suit whatever target market. If minorities have money to spend, the corporations will go to them, and they will change their marketing to appeal to the different groups. This does not mean that racism is over. 

The game of life is rigged to give people who already have advantages even more advantages. Since it is the 21-century, and one cannot just go about overtly oppressing other people. Inequality that has persisted from the legacy of racism continues, albeit in a veiled manner. To maintain the status quo, the dominant group has to come up with what Ghalager calls normative ideology, where everyone thinks that there is no racism while it is alive and thriving.

Race: Power of Illusion (Extra Credit Opportunity)

The difference between us episode looks for biological differences between the races, and they find one. In fact there are more differences between people of the same race e.g white and white, than there are between people of different races e.g. white and black.

As concerns pseudo-science,  Dr. Hammonds, a historian of science says the scientists are a product of their own society. Most scientists lived in a society where the people in power, who were white, were obsessed with the idea of race and racial superiority and they were looking for any clue that can distinguish their race as the superior one. It is a scary thing that even with the scientific advances we have, pseudo science has not gone away. Just last week the Heritage foundation came up with a study that says immigrants will never reach high IQ levels!

Last year I went to Thomas Jefferson's home in Monti Cello, and I could not help remarking to my friends the irony that the guy who said 'all men are created equally' had slaves working and waiting on him when he was coming up with this wisdom. But it is clear he meant 'all WHITE men are created equally.' So back to the subject of idea of racism, which is the subject of the second episode. The second episode mentions his other lesser known work 'Notes on Virginia' where he categorically (and might have been one of the first people to say outrightly) says that the black race is inferior to the white race.

Episode three talks about what Croteau and Hoynes call 'racialization of the state' (implementation of policies that discriminated against minorities and provided the whites numerous advantages). This systemic policies meant that immigrants could not get citizenship or own property; blacks returning from the war could not take advantages of government subsidies to get housing and segregated schooling which ensured inequality when looking for jobs.

Extra Credit Opportunity - TED Talks Education

Ted talks education featured a total of nine talks delivered by nine industry professionals, advocates and thought leaders. The program sought to explore ideas about how to deal with the high school dropouts. I grasped three underlying themes in all the talks: the need to change the education system in order to give a learning environment that inspires learning, not just being in school or passing examinations; the need for teachers to be the champions of their students; and need for the teachers to be given the support to do what is right for their students.

All human beings have the capacity to learn, the degree of success depends on how much effort one puts in. This Angela Duckworth calls grit – the ability to work towards sets goals without giving up. This is a quality that needs to be cultivated from when children are young and nurtured especially in school, not just by teachers but also parents.

More than two talks centered on the idea of building relationships with students. One speaker Rita Pierson who has been a teacher for over 40 years said children need champions. Still on the same theme another speaker – Pearl Aredondo said she strives to help children not to become victims of their own circumstances. Roles come with expectations, and teacher’s role is also to nurture their students and provide a safe haven for them. These two speakers are very right, if children know that their teacher cares about them, they will do their best not to disappoint the teacher and everyone else.

Geoffrey Canada, the President and CEO of Harlem Promise Academies, talked about the need to change the business model of the current education system. He advises the government and teachers to look at the data from the yearly tests, and to tailor their education to fit results that are desirable. Bill gates of Microsoft talked about developing teachers capacities to do their work.

Sir Kenneth Robinson talked about No child Left Behind and the irony that it is actually leaving lots of people behind. He mentions the principles that ran counter to the current culture of education i.e. people are different and diverse and a one-size-fits-all is not the best way to implement education; the second is the importance of sparking curiosity in learners; lastly, the need for creativity. He argues against standardization of tests and gives the example of the Finland education system.

All the teachers who spoke at this TED taught in schools where children from poor and disadvantaged neighborhood attended. And the reason they are agitating for change is because they realize the importance of a decent if not good education. Apart from intellectual growth, it is also the only way that one will be able to achieve a better life. These TED talks also illustrated the importance of school as an agent of socialization.

Blog #8: Social classes

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy – Oscar Wilde

I know a few people (myself included) who love to think that we do not belong in any class; and we have a hobby of looking with curiosity at how other people behave in the context of class. But I kid myself; it is a very classed society. Growing up, no time was the matter of social stratification starkly visible than during mass on Christmas mornings. It was a village affair, and everyone had to attend. The well-to-do who work in the big cities would troop to the home villages to flaunt their wealth to simple village folk. This was 20 years ago, and it has only gotten worse; my kid brother, who knows a ton about vehicle models, and I would play a game every holiday and try to guess who else will show up during the next holiday with a top-of-the-rage vehicle based on what latest model we see in the village and we would be right every time.

People like us

The video People Like Us talks about the ways in which Americans class themselves and how their perceptions and expectations shape people for generations. The importance of anticipatory socialization is underlined in two clips that talk about trying to fit in to upper classes e.g the woman who undergoes training because she wants to nab a rich man, and the belles in the high school who are being trained to belong to a special clique. As the clip set in Hampton’s NY shows, even after going through hell trying to move up the social class ladder, it is still not easy to seamlessly look the part and swim with the rich people. This is in part because people in higher classes can afford to socially close themselves from other people thereby making belonging very hard. A simple Google search of the word uppity revealed interesting results for me a minute ago. I did not know it has a racial connotation when used on an African-American! It really shows the importance of looking at where race and class intersect – black people in higher classes are not viewed the same way as white people in that same class.

Explaining global inequality.

Globalization is being spearheaded by corporations. Corporations are owned by a few individuals who are out to make profit; and they take advantage of developing countries endless cheap labor and markets. The need for work means that people are willing to any job that pays even if the work conditions are not favorable. That is why there are sweatshops around the globe.  A population with money spends it on basic needs, and if there is a surplus, people indulge in luxury goodies.

Early this year, Kenya elected its fourth president. A month before people hit the ballot; we had two presidential debates (oh yes we borrowed pres. debates), it was the first time I had of the idea of ‘improving the economy by growing the middle class’ in the Kenyan political rhetoric. It is already a pretty consumerist country but now the desire fuelling consumption is now going to be that of trying to look the ‘middle class’ part. It is neocolonialism at best.

Media Magic: Making Class Invinsible

This article talked about how the media portrays the different classes. Everyone is in the middle class, the poor do not exist, if there are poor people then there are not doing enough to get out of poverty, or they are out of their luck (especially around christmas time and with regards to white families). The upper class wealthier people also do not want attention drawn to their wealth, so they consider themselves as middle class. It reminds of a story I read about one of the bosses at FOX who considers himself poor and oppressed by the liberal media. 

Blog 7: Deviance

Inequality exists where there are deep-sited ideologies that support it (Croteau & Hoynes 126); for example, in the U.S. ideologies that promote individuality and success praise personal achievement while blaming underachievers poor people for not doing enough to get out of poverty. The reason why this ideologies have persisted, even with empirical evidence that point to the fact that poverty is caused by many more intersecting factors like race, class, gender and location, is because the poor and undeserving do actually serve a lot of ‘positive’ functions in the world of rich people. In his article, Herbert Gans talks about these positive functions of undeserving poor. Some I would never think about like supplying popular culture villains (I thought this one stemmed more from a racist mindset...), moral legitimation (makes sense) and reproduction of stigma and stigmatized.

I love that he points out the conflation of ideas around deviancy i.e behavior that is different and behavior that is socially harmful. The tendency to label deviancy negatively stems from the notion that deviancy is socially harmful, which is not true. The distinction between socially different and socially harmful is important because many people do not deviate from their norms just for kicks, they deviate because the dominant culture is oppressive to them. A great example that comes to mind that is a result of this conflation is the belief that gay marriage is deviance because it is socially harmful

The phrase 'undeserving poor' reminds me of Noam Chomsky's Drug Policy as Social Control  where he talks about America's superfluous people and and the efforts to to control them, that is why the drug war was instituted, stop and frisk and other such laws. The positive uses are only positive to rich people, and only serve the functions of the rich and powerful. When their usefulness is deemed unnecessary, they will go back to being simply superfluous.

Now to the six examples of deviance

A few years ago, I got to attend a funeral in which the person had committed suicide. I did not know how negatively deviant this was until I learnt that the local church, which is an example of an agent of social control of which the person was a member of, was not going to officiate the funeral! There were no eulogies. To date the rest of the family is viewed as a bad omen. 

Apart from people who commit suicide, the other deviants who elicit mass ostracization are sex offenders. In cultures all over the world people who defy the norm of consensual sex are labeled as deviants because of under-conform to the expectation of consensual sex.

The textbook does not spend much times talking about positive deviants. These days our uptake to new technologies is so fast we do not think twice about adopting new technologies, especially if they are greener. The current tug of war I see is oil companies advertising aggressively about oil-based energy, especially because there is a positive shift towards solar energy.  Its is a slow moving shift but which will become eventually normalized

Some deviants find company and solace in deviant subcultures for example the rock and rollers from Bergenfield that Donna Gaines chronicles in her article wasteland. Others include tattoo cultures, and homosexual culture.

On the subways, there are piercing advertisements against teen pregnancy. Teen mothers together with single motherhood are examples of deviancy because they do not conform to the accepted trajectory of finishing school, or in other places getting married before having children. These examples can fall into deviance as immorality, especially from the eyes of the religious right.

Herbert Gans does not argue that poverty is a form of deviance, but it is easy to see poverty as deviance especially from the eyes of the rich. In that case, acts like drug peddling and begging can be seen as deviance. Law breaking which statistics show is skewed towards poor people and minorities is explained as a deviance especially because laws, rules and regulations are part of the social contract we have with the government. 

Blog #6: Socialization

"The images in our lives affect the reality of our lives" - Jean Kilbourne
 
One of the 'news' making headlines on Fox News Channel this week was an advertisement on a rival broadcasting channel that talked about kids belonging not only to the parents but also to the community, and the importance of investing in social institutions which children interact with. I took that as an interesting backdrop for my blogpost about socialization. I will summarize the two videos that are part of this assignment and the two articles and how they all relate to the chapter.

Tony Porter presents his  Call to Men TED about the socialization of the male child by using examples from his childhood and how he treats his own children (a boy 12 years old and a girl 11 years old). He starts off by talking about what he has been taught about being a man. This collective socialization is also referred to as the man box. He further talks about how he has acted in the past as a result of his socialization for example in the way he has treated his kids on one occasion; he comforts his young girl when she comes crying to him, and his son does the same, he scolds him and tells him to stop crying and act like a man. He explains where this particular mentality about the way we should treat the two sexes comes from: Socialization.

 

I found it interesting his comparison of what boys are taught about manhood, or manly traits, and the other side of the coin: what this male collective socialization means to women. From the video, he says men are taught that 'they are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior; women are inferior; that men are strong; women are weak; that women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects.’ This socialization makes men think women are lesser people and in many cases it has been the societal justification for violence against women. He ends the TED talk by calling on men to redefine what manhood means because the liberation of men is tied to the liberation of women.

Killing us softly is a documentary that looks at how media shapes the socialization of men and women. Kilbourne starts by outlining the role of media, which is more than selling products. Advertising spreads values and concepts about love, sexuality, romance, success, and subtly defining what normalcy should be and who we should be. As part of the socialization process, we grow up inundated by advertisements of what the ideal woman should look like and what it takes to achieve the perfect body, for example make up, nip here, tuck there.

Perhaps the most negative effect of advertisement is the objectification of women and the propagation of violence against women.  She says objectification is the first step of violence “ turning someone into a thing, and making them less than a woman is the first step to violence. The second half deals with the ideas about gender roles that are passed down to us. For example men should be powerful and dominating, while women should be passive; when women are given power and freedom, it is trivialized. She gives great examples of how women’s body parts are used to sell products and the pornographic nature of advertising that plants the idea of casual sex.The big take away from this talk is that the kind of socialization that upholds masculinity and devalues femininity robs us of the whole person that we have the potential to be.

These two videos are directly related to the chapter on Socialization in that they both talk about the various agents of socialization and the life course. Killing Us Softly talks about the role of media in shaping who we should be and how we go through live shaping and reshaping the concept of ourselves at a particular stage of life. For example when girls get to adolescences they start feeling insecure about bodies. A Call to Men explains the effect his peers had on him with the example about the girl she was supposed to rape; and the influence of family when he gives the example of father appreciating his strength as they go through a family tragedy. 

Heath's paper Parents Socialization of Children  highlights the importance of parents in a child's life and the outcomes as a result of parenting styles. it gave three types of parents: authoritarian, permissive and authoritative and the consequent personalities they children get. NYMag's Retro Wife talked about the choice of a small section of well-educated career women opting to stay at home and raise their children instead of pursuing careers or jungling both careers and children like the rest of the modern women. Well, two things - one this article was about financial freedom, and two - I do understand the importance of parents being there to teach their children to mind their Ps and Qs, but we have made so many strides as women such that in circa 2013, we should not be having a conversation about women choosing between kids and careers. I personally think articles like these fall into the whole socialization of gender roles that belongs in the past.

 

Blog #5: POWER

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974

I read with utmost interest Iris Marion Young’s article “the many faces of oppression.” According to her, oppression comes in five different shades: violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism. Powerlessness stands out the most to me because it is lack of power - the inability to demand better and equal treatment - that makes people continue to live in oppression.

The chapter on power is the most interesting topic on Experience Sociology yet. It defines power as the ability to bring about an intended outcome, even when opposed by others. Power has two sides to it: the power to do something (positive) for oneself or others and the power over someone or something. The ‘power over’ approach focuses on individual enhancement and achievement while the ‘power to’ approach focuses on overcoming opposition and dominating others. It is the latter form of power management that is responsible for oppression and other social ills.

There are three important uses of power that directly affect our lives: economic power affects resource allocation; political power affects how and what rules and decisions are enacted; finally there is cultural power which defines the reality we live in. this last use of power interests me very much. Dominant culture, social institutions and the media we consume define social reality in a particular way. People in positions of power have the capacity to manufacture the reality they want the masses to believe.

For power to work it has to be met with compliance (or disobedience). In trying to understand how Germans would let and why some ordinary citizens participated in the holocaust, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a series of social psychology experiments where teachers were asked to administer electrical shocks of varying degrees to students who did not give proper answers. I found the prompts from the professor inside the room with the teachers very interesting. He just told the participants they needed to continue with the experiment, clarified any questions the teachers had and reassured them that the student will not die from the voltage. This is a good example of the trust we bestow on people who wield expert and informational power.  This is not to say compliance is a bad thing, we all need to comply with a lot of laws, rules and regulations set by the social institutions we interact with to ensure the smooth running of society. But when power has negative results, to change the circumstances we live in, it is essential that we revolt.

Blog #4: Culture in Pictures

This blog post, as was the last one, still concentrates on the topic of culture. Today's project is to talk about my culture using pictures. So, to start us of, I would like to share with you a few pictures that represent my culture.


This is a picture of the national anthem. It is essentially a prayer that asks God for blessings and protection, asks the people to put in the hard work required for nation building and asks for peace to prevail. To me these first two pictures represent the dominant ideology. It is also a manifestation of the values that we share as a nation which includes belief in a higher power and communalism. This version of the anthem is in the Kiswahili language, one of the national languages.

  My country is made up of 42 unique tribes, each with its own set of cultural artifacts. The people in this picture have on their person some of the cultural artifacts and objects that can be found around the North Western part of the country.                                                                         

The national flag itself, and the colors are symbolic. Red is for the blood shed during the fight for independence from British colonialism, green is for the productive land that we have been blessed with, white is for peace and black represents the people, while the shield and spears symbolizes the defense for the country and its people.


This is the screenshot of the website of Bomas of Kenya, a government organization that recognizes multiculturalism, and nurtures it.




One of the biggest cultural wars going on right now is the recognition of gay people. The logo on the left represents one of the organizations that is fighting for the rights of gay people in the country.

Since the text book talks about a lady who went to my country and experienced culture shock with the public transportation in Kenya, I thought it best to should share a picture of the transport madness that are matatus. They also represent an urban, hip and young at heart subculture in the cities and big towns. 

Blog #3: Culture As the Windows Through Which We view Our World

Teenage wasteland is the story of a reporter who goes Bergen to investigate a historically unique case of four suburban kids who commit suicide together. She wanted to understand why this young people would choose suicide as the best course of action. She starts in Bergenfield where she finds out that there are specific socio-cultural patterns operating there through which a teenage suicide pact became objectively possible; she also finds out that there are particular conditions that made the town label kids like the ones who committed suicide ‘burnouts’ ‘greasers’ ‘hoods’ ‘beats’ ‘freaks’ ‘hippies’ ‘punks’. She spends the next two years learning about these outcast youth.

This reading was in conjunction with chapter 3 of Experience Sociology, which talks about culture. While reading this article, I kept thinking about the nonmaterial element of culture i.e. values, beliefs, standards, knowledge, behaviors and norms; when majority in the society share this elements, then it is the dominant culture. When a subset of a society does not conform, instead it has values, beliefs, standards, knowledge, behaviors and norms that are different from the rest of a society, then it is a subculture. The ‘burnout youth’ phenomena that Donna Gaines encounters in Bergenfield and beyond shared a subculture.

Culture can be seen as an onion. It has numerous layers to it. The outermost layer is what we can see. In the case of Teenage Wasteland, it can be physical like the description of how the teenagers looked: they wore lots of black and leather, had shaggy haircuts, and listened to thrash metal. The second outer most layer is composed of what our heroes are, and what they pass down to us. For many of us, it is the people we learn from, for others it is the people they admire. The teenagers’ heroes in Teenage Wasteland were rock musicians like AC/DC, whose music was found beside the corpses. At the center of it all are the core values – those deeply held principles or standards by which we make judgments about the world. These values are what led the community at Bergenfield to label some of its youth as burnouts.

When cultures and subcultures are too different from each other, then there will be conflict or consensus. In her research, the author of Teenage Wasteland finds that there are differences between what sets of a population expect of each other, for example, parents expected children to stay in school and get absorbed in legitimate, established routine of social activity; but this was not enough for the kids. They still got bored and occupied their time with worshipping Rock and Roll icons. One of the reasons that emerged to explain the burnout youth phenomenon was ‘teenage boredom’. As teenage boredom became a concern, because it was leading to alcohol and drugs and in extreme cases suicide, the town tried to remedy it with afterschool activities and part time afterschool jobs.

blog #2: Correlation Is Not Causation

One of the fundamental principles of sociology is that every theory has to be backed by research and evidence. A successful social science research focuses on observing and documenting identifiable, repeating patterns of human though and action. When empirical evidence suggests that there is a correlation between variable X and variable Y, it does not automatically mean that X causes Y to happen (Hoynes 36).

The essay association is not causation addresses the fallacy that alcohol and drugs cause violence. This fallacy comes from the theory that alcohol and drugs makes causes people to release their inhibitions thereby causing violent behavior. In the essay Gelles and Cavanaugh share the arguments and evidence against the theory that alcohol and drugs causes violence: Cross-cultural evidence shows that there is variation in drinking behavior based on what a particular culture believes about alcohol (Gelles 2), this cross-cultural evidence was put to laboratory test which further proved that drinking was related to aggression only as a function of expectancy; Blood tests of men arrested for wife beating showed that only 20% of the men were legally intoxicated, while a national survey showed strong links between alcohol and violent behavior, analysis of drinking behavior at the time of the violent incident clearly demonstrates that alcohol was not used immediately prior to the violent conflict in the majority (76 percent) of the cases (3). All this researches did not document pre-use personalities, which would support a causal relationship.

The essay highlights major problems that can happen when collecting and analyzing data. In studies linking alcohol and drugs to violence, the concepts are not clearly and universally defined, for example the terms family violence, domestic violence, violence, intimate violence, and abuse are often used interchangeably. This raises the question of validity of the data measured and compromises conclusions. An analysis of the research designs of the links between alcohol and violent behavior shows that most research designs do not have control groups, which helps determine whether significant correlation exists; data collection happens at one point in time which makes it hard to determine whether there is in effect causality between intoxication and violence. The key evidence against the disinhibition theory however is the absence of a theoretical rationale. This means that research undermines the theory that alcohol and some drugs chemically affect the brain and break down or reduce inhibitions, and thus cause violent behavior.

Blog Entry #1: Who am I

I come from a country in East Africa called Kenya. It is about the size of Nevada. I come from a tribe of pastoralists called Turkana. I grew up in my grandmother’s house until I was in second grade. She was a staunch Catholic, so church was very much a part of my upbringing.  Life with her was easy and fun.  Most mornings, she would ask me if I wanted to go to school or not; naturally my answer would be no, in which case I would accompany the goat herders. Perhaps the most influential person in my life has been my mother. By age 7 I still could not count numbers 1-20, write or recite the alphabet. She personally taught me how to read and write in under one week. It was worse than a military boot camp. But since then, I fell in love with books and learning. I also picked up my love for current happenings, and understanding social problems from her.

Through out school, all the children around me always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I never had an answer. I dilly-dallied with the idea of being a catholic nun and an English teacher for while.  The other ‘profession ‘ I have been interested in for a long while is working for an international non-governmental organization (INGO) or a non-profit as it is referred to here. They do a lot of good work helping people in dire circumstances and I want to be a part of this effort. So here I am in college. I know where I want to work in, I am still deciding what I want to do. These days I know that I want to understand how people think, make decisions and respond to change. In my head I imagine that this knowledge will make me a better development operative.

I look forward to exploring my interests and shaping my sociological perspective in this sociology class.