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.