Week 5- A Bronx Tale

This week in Sociology, we watched a movie, "A Bronx Tale", which is about a kid growing up in an Italian Village in the Bronx in the 1950's. The movie captures his journey through adolescence and was a great example of the sociological mindfulness, as well as generalizations, which we also discussed when we read, "Should We Generalize" by Joel Charon. The movie was very powerful and was a great example of how we truly are shaped by when and where we live and that the people around us will always impact us, for better or for worse. Many racial issues came up in the movie, especially seen through the main character's best friends discussions of the African-Americans living near them. However, I found it very inspiring and moving that the main character did everything he could to be civil and ultimately non-discriminatory with the African-American group, which we saw through him dating an African-American girl, and saving her brother from a "brawl" with the Italians. From this, we saw that there truly are good people out there that mean well, and aren't always generalizing about people, which was an idea discussed in Charon's article. This article, along with the movie, showed that although generalizations and stereotyping are inevitable, there is such thing as an accurate generalization, and that if we try our best to accurately generalize, then generalizations can become beneficial, as seen in "A Bronx Tale". This movie, although very different from my life, reminded me of the many stereotypes that we make everyday.

Everyone stereotypes. Like I said before, it's inevitable. I hear about 10 or 15 stereotypical comments/generalizations a day, some about Jewish stereotypes, and less noticeable ones, such as hearing comments like, "you're wearing black. therefore, you must be having a bad day" (which is another thing we discussed in class this week). I have always tried my hardest to not generalize about people, just because I know that it can be hurtful and won't help the task that all humans must learn to do, which is to generalize accurately about people. This week taught our class a lot about human nature and how we do live in a constantly connected and stereotyping world, whether we want to or not.