Nine

I have the privilege to be a suburban white male in the United States. Since I am white, I am reminded of my skin color perhaps once a day, if that. If I were a different race, let's just say dark-skinned, then I might be reminded of my skin color maybe once every 30 minutes or so, on average.

Race is a man-made social construct, based roughly on one's proximity to the equator, shown here in this image.

The closer to the equator, the darker the skin. This is an evolutionary adjustment for survival, for vitamin D and sensitivity to sunlight. 

I have vague to no stories that deal with race.

In Tim Wise's video, "White like Me", Wise explains that as a white minority in a black majority neighborhood, he found many interesting things about race. There is a large difference between how much racism still exists and how much race still appears to exist on the media. Wise mentions how on almost every news network after Obama's victory in the presidential election, newscasters were preaching how we as a country have witnessed the end of racism because we have voted a black president in. The truth is racism is just a prevalent, but has switched from more explicit to more implicit. Given the fact that we are indeed many steps ahead of where we were 50 years ago, we cannot keep pretending that this issue is nonexistent.

In class, I took an exam online to see if I was implicitly racist. I was found to have a moderate favor for European whites. Although my implicit racism will continue to be a force in my mind, I will continue to strive for both equity and equality for all "races".

Final Paper

Nicholas Perozzi

3rd Period Sociology, 7008

Anonymous High School

Mr. Salituro

My community service project was twenty-five hours in the Freshman Mentor Program here at Anonymous High. My work consisted primarily of helping students adjust from their average-sized middle schools to a comparatively giant high school. I established an environment in which the freshmen felt comfortable to not only express themselves but to connect with other freshmen they may have never imagined talking to.

It is fascinating to me how sociology makes such an impact in the classroom. From the first day of advisory, one can tell who are the introverts, extroverts, geeks, and athletes. I swear, it's something out of the Breakfast Club, every time. However, when the kids are forced (not actually forced, but "strongly encouraged") to participate and intermingle with one another, the observations can be fascinating. When a more is violated as the pretty blonde chick strikes conversation with the boy who is on his iPad in the corner all the time, when a kid tries to describe another freshman in the class without referring to the fact that he's black, or when a twin is mistaken for her sister once a week during second semester, I am grateful that I studied sociology.

A social construction of reality is how a group of people mutually agree to behave around other people over tacit communication, based on prior experience from each of the members of the group. When I did my sociology-hour-counted service in the advisory second semester, I could tell that there was a large social construction that advisory was an unwanted event. Despite good things coming out of first semester, society was telling our freshmen that they didn't want to be there. Sociological mindfulness is the way in which one feels they have an impact on the society around them. Essentially, it's each person's influence on the social construction. We told our freshmen the first day of second semester that if they go into advisory thinking they will have a good time, then they will have a good time. If they go into advisory expecting "stupid stuff" every day, then they will construct their thoughts to match up with their hypothesis. By telling the freshmen to be aware of their sociological mindfulness, we helped create a better advisory environment. During A World Of Difference, an event in which freshmen are encouraged to open up about their opinions, many of the freshmen were ready to volunteer and talk about their personal lives, a phenomenon that goes against the original social construct that advisory was a place where people sat and did nothing but complain about how they sit and do nothing.

In-groups are clusters of people who unite and often take pride in their togetherness for whatever they may stand for. Out-groups are others who do not belong in the given in-group. As an advisory, we experience in-group-bias when we convince ourselves that our door is better than all of the other doors in the door-decorating contest, even though it clearly is not. Within the advisory, out-group-bias was applied when one of the jocks of the advisory secretly accused another freshman of not being good enough to do well in life, solely because the jock was unfamiliar with this kid he did not know. These in-group and out-group attitudes within the advisory would quickly disintegrate as there was a challenge or activity that required cooperation from everybody, or a superordinate goal, as coined by Dr. Weiten in his A.P. Psychology textbook. As we learned from Tom Shadyac's documentary "I am", people tend to be more cognitively alert when they cooperate with one another than when they compete against one another.

The ideas of in-group and out-group can be closely related to ethnocentrism when talking about second semester advisory. Ethnocentrism is the love and pride for one's own in-group. The goal of my community service is to limit the culture shock, or the dissatisfying unfamiliarity with a new culture, when the freshmen leave for a new social construct as sophomores. One more, or a big social "no-no", that happened was the pretty blonde cheerleader from our advisory went over to a random freshman boy on his iPad, unprecedented, and started talking to him about their math class. Even in the year 2014 second semester advisory, in a place where we try to stress everybody accepting others equally, this still got heads to turn because it was so rare, might I say frowned upon.

Death was brought up seldom during my community service in advisory, but when it was, it was handled very gently and carefully, as death is sometimes perceived as a taboo topic to discuss. Work was brought up whenever the counselor brought up college or any sort of four-year-plan. Whenever work was the topic, all of the kids were readily attentive, as if they are all itching to work towards their success as a high school student. Love did not come up very often, but when it did, it was discrete and under the table, just as society had constructed it to be. Dependency the same story.

During A World of Difference, there was an activity I moderated in which each student would have to pick a side whether they agreed or disagreed with a given statement. These statements stretched across all lands of controversy, from gender inequality to racial inequality to sexual orientation to bullying. Nature is the innate, from-birth being that people are predestined to be. Whenever choosing upon a topic, may students would often pick the choice that reflects not the nature, but the nurture, or the conditioned influences on a person, of their being. People are nurtured by agents of socialization, or gateways of influence between the people and the social construction. People's decision whether to agree or disagree with the given statement was based off of what their agents had influenced them to pick, not necessarily what their genetics told them was right.

The only difference between males and females that I observed during my community service (I hate to call it community service, I did it because I love to do it, I swear) was that when people were distracted with technology, boys would always be on iPads, and girls would always be on their iPhones. Girls may enjoy talking to other people, so they communicate with their phones more. Boy may enjoy doing more activities or playing more games, so they play with their iPads more. Even if these hypotheses are incorrect, it's still strange that all of the boys were on their iPads, the girls, iPhones.

When the one black kid in our advisory walked up to get a Kleenex, one of my volunteer mates took the loose change on the projector and slid it into his pocket. The entire class called him out on his implicit racism, and we had a good discussion about race. As Tim Wise pointed out in his documentary "White Like Me", many people have some sort of implicit racism favoring European whites, no matter what race. I reminded the class that the one African-American is only one kid, and he does not represent all of the people of his race, so they shouldn't treat him like such. They didn't.

I enjoyed this class, Sal. Thanks for waking me up to reality. I needed it.

Eight (And Community Service)

Deviance is when one departs from the norms and customs set by society. The idea of breaking away from social construction, with a stretch, can be viewed as an illusion because the social construction never explicitly existed in the first place. It exists, however, as an implicit force. Deviance is relative to the social class that one has been placed in, and once in that social class, there is more relativity within that social class. At my high school, social class is played out, but not nearly to the extend portrayed in the Saints and Roughnecks reading. At Stevenson, we are conditioned to behave like Saints, to better prepare ourselves for the real world. There are occasional Roughnecks that are indeed being deviant from society, but their numbers are so low it is hard to consider them a major group of similar caliber to Saints. I am blessed to be part of such a wealthy community, where I have the privilege to be able to examine social classes from very high up on the scale. My parents consider us "middle class", but after this unit I see that we aren't really the "middle" of any scale.

For my first community service project, I worked as a freshman mentor in the FMP here at my high school. I will use part of my 35 second semester senior hours for sociology, and part for NHS, to prevent double-dipping. 10 hours of service were recorded via NHS, and 25 were recorded here via sociology. My experience was here at Anonymous High School in Town, IL. I participated in this service for half a class period every Monday through Thursday. My faculty advisor was Ms. King, my counselor Ms. Kulla. (e-mail probably just jking@dxxx.org) I will answer all of the questions via bullet points as follows:

• Before my experience as an FM, I viewed the service as just helping freshmen not have a mental breakdown as they enter this gigantic and complicated (and anonymous) high school. My expectations were more handling a lot of problem students and less of handling students who had average levels of conformity into high school. I was nervous about not being able to make them all perfect kids.
• Let's just say hypothetically it took place in a random room number in this anonymous high school, let's say... 2900? My freshmen were all unique people and all had their own thing going for them. I came to realize my job was not to turn them all into the same, perfect student heading down the same, perfect path, but to help each and every one of them recognize themselves and guide them to their own paths throughout anonymous high school.
• It surprised me how much of an influence I could make on these kids, despite them all being so different from myself. Age is a social construction, and as an 18-year-old, I assumed my role as Advisory Leader efficiently because they were only 14-year-olds.
• After advisory each day, as long as at least just one freshman said they enjoyed advisory or they felt like it really helped their lives every so often, that means something to me. It tells me that what I'm doing is worthwhile, and that there's a reason that I do what I do.

I apologize for the tardiness of me posting the community service hours, Sal. You're a good teacher and I feel as if I let you down by turning these all in late. I continue to strive for a better work ethic every day, which is both tedious and painfully simple for me.

King's 6B Advisory, enjoying precious 72 degree weather in Chicago.

Six

Post 6 is due tuesday, April 8.  We have been learning about the socialization process.  This includes the distinction between nature and nurture and the importance of nurture.  We also saw that certain agents of socialization play a strong role in the nurture process.  

Please remember to

1.  write properly and post on time.

2. explain at least one source such as a reading (What is human nature? or Agents of Socialization), or a video (Danielle, Consuming Kids).

3. explain two or more topics we have learned (such as those above in bold) and give unique examples of how they might apply to your own life, or something unique from your perspective.

The socialization process is the method in which people adjust to the customs and norms around them. There are two main ways in which one is socialized, nature and nurture:

• Nature is what is deemed as the innate, inevitable, and permanent traits that were predestined to last with one the day he or she was born.
• Nurture, on the other hand, is marked by learned, trained, and conditioned traits brought to a person by outside factors. These factors do not come with childbirth.

Many people, including myself, believe that nurture is by far the more important factor in the socialization process. In our psychology class, we read many examples of identical twins separated at birth in which the two twins, who were genetically identical in almost every measurable way, went on to live very different lives and develop very different mindsets towards various topics. I am being intentionally vague because there were so many unique instances in which the same result occurred. Very neat stuff!

An agent of socialization is a gateway in which ideas are transferred to people. These agents could be social, such as with friends or family. These agents could also be institutional, such as with school, religion, workplace, government, or, most explicitly, mass media.

A powerful documentary we watched in my sociology class called "Consuming Kids" puts attention on the social agent of media when it comes to consumer products and ideologies for children in America. This is a brief summary from imdb.com (sorry Sal, I just couldn't have paraphrased it any better):

• Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world.

This goes to show how powerful social agents are in socializing people. This also demonstrates the large power of nurture on the socialization of a person, as this "relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine" does not come to us as we're born.

Seven

For this post, we have explored how something like gender can be so taken-for-granted.  In our culture there is a polarization of what it means to be female and male and heterosexual and lesbian or gay.  Our culture pushes individuals to opposite ends of a spectrum.  For this post, use examples from your own experience to show how our society socializes men and women into narrow boxes.  How do the agents of socialization play a role in your experiences?  To demonstrate literacy, feel free to comment on the movies Killing Us Softly4, Tough Guise2, the reading from Kimmel and Mahler about masculinity or the myriad other sources on my blog posts over the last 2 weeks.

Post Seven concerns gender as a key issue in the United States. As we observed in the documentary we watched in Sociology, gender equality is NOT a settled issue. In fact, as the woman proclaims in Killing Us Softly 4, if anything, it has gotten worse in the last 30 years or so. In this documentary, the woman presents the audience with dozens of advertisements that range from the subliminal submission of women to the downright objectification into objects, like beer. "Sex sells" is something that marketers will bank on until the day they die, especially since the government is no longer regulating the ethicality of these advertisements.

In Tough Guise 2 (which has now become my favorite documentary of all time), the man (blanking out on names right now, my apologies) makes the argument that violence in the world is considered a universal issue that applies to all, even though that women are responsible for a mere 14% of all violence in the United States. It's a men's issue. The sensation and obsession with being a man and toughening up can only result in either intimidation or fights breaking out. Many school shootings occur because boys feel that they were picked on or weren't manly enough. One boy even declared that he wasn't insane, just mad, and that he was explicitly taking out his frustration on the years of dominance-driven bullying. Men cause pride, pride causes anger, and anger causes fistfights.

Why is this an issue? Why can't we all wake up tomorrow and officially declare equality? I believe the problem is slightly similar to race in a sense that our zeitgeist preaches equality, yet so many violations of this thesis are apparent that it's hard to convince even ourselves that the country we live in is equal. If we can convince ourselves that we don't need to "be a man" to be a good man or a "be a woman" in order to be a good woman, we could level the playing field in gender. This is almost impossible though, because there are so many men in this country who are outright convinced that men are dominant. In my AWOD classroom, all but two freshmen stated that they think men have opportunities in our society that women do not. The two boys, of course, were the toughest two boys in our class.

Five

This post concerns American culture. "American culture" in itself is a fascinating thing because we are ultimately the biproduct of the combination of all other cultures mushed together in a 238-year-old melting pot. Within this culture lies some major differences from the rest of the world as a heavily individualistic society.

Death.

Death is unique in America. We fear of talking about it, despite it being an inevitable fact of life. As Morrie even says in the movie Tuesdays with Morrie, "Death ends a life but not a relationship." We repress the memories and concepts of death and dying, whereas in other cultures they still mourn, but seem to accept it for what it is and not ignore it or repress it. We should take a conscious effort to accept death for what it is, and not keep our heads stuck in our work.

Speaking of which, work.

Work is so imperative in American culture that we identify people by "what they do." Whereas in Australia people ask other people "Where have you been?", here in the United States people are defined by what they do to earn a living. Your level of happiness is not a factor.

Love.

It's quite fascinating that a culture whose music is almost entirely based on love feels so repressed to express love to one another. We value boldness, strength, and control of emotions, and more often than not our feelings of love are suppressed under these traits we try so hard to emulate. People misinterpret love as a primarily romantic phenomenon, but Morrie explains that real love is not expressed with your body, but your heart. If we can find a way to express our love more from our heart and not from our body, it is perhaps possible that we find less of a need to express a control of emotions and more of a need to care about one another.

Dependency.

Amurica! We're all about individualism! We thrive on the opportunity to do everything ourselves, for doing something by ourselves means we're responsible and well-off. This is an ironic way to live by, since humans are one of the most dependent creatures on the face of the earth. We need almost nonstop care in the first few years of our lives. In a TED talk by Brene Brown, Ms. Brown recognizes that in an attempt to block out our vulnerability, we often block out other feelings as well. Morrie explains that in the very early and late parts of our life, we need people to take care of us. It is in the middle where we believe that we should be independent, when in fact it's when we need people the most.

Four

One of the reasons I took sociology was because of the fascination I had over different cultures and how they may blend or contrast from one another.

Culture shock is when one has a first taste of how another country or culture operates. More often than not, the outsider may struggle to fit in with these norms.

Ethnocentrism is observing and opinionating other cultures from the point of view of the outsider's own culture. A few years back, I was fortunate enough to travel to Paris, France, where I had one of the coolest vacations ever. We went and sat down at a restaurant where the head manager and waiter was just sitting there at another table, not serving us. We thought (and my mother still thinks) that the waiter was simply being inconsiderate, but we then realized we failed to understand the culture in the given scenario.

Different cultures have different meanings with their gestures. For example, the hand gesture of thumb and index finger together with the other three fingers sticking up may mean "A-OK", but in Italy... Let's just say it means something very, very different.

Norms are standards of behavior placed in societies, some implicit and some explicit.

Folkways are a type of norm that if not followed, it can still be deemed socially acceptable. For example, if I were to be at a nice restaurant with my family and chewed with my mouth open, people may notice and deem it as rude but it wouldn't be considered tragic in any fashion.

Mores are a more intense type of norm that if not followed, people around will definitely be concerned. For example, if I was in a crowded elevator and I let out a huge fart, while afterwards proclaiming pride in my achievement, people will stare at me with great frustration, as farting in an elevator is very frowned upon in society.

Taboos are very imperative norms that if not followed, you will be disrespected to a great degree. For example, if I, at my fancy shmancy dinner table at my fancy shmancy restaurant, were to say "hey guys hold on I have to take a huge shirt*", people probably wouldn't talk to me very much for the rest of the night.

*shirt was autocorrected from something else