Week 17- Crash

This past week in sociology, we watched the movie, Crash. The storyline showed multiple different characters that were of different races and all of their stories ended up being connected to one another. They were connected by one binding force- race. As Sal said, the main character was just the idea of race and the movie depicted how racial discrimination and the concept of explicit race plays a role in our everyday lives, whether we like to think so or not. Explicit race/racism, which is the belief that ones own race is superior to others, and discrimination, which is acting upon ones own perceived notion of that particular race. In the movie, there were many examples of explicit racism, such as when the guy went into the health-insurance office and was upset over his plan and claimed that he could "find six more qualified white men" to replace an African-American woman's job. Sandra Bullock's character also was prejudiced towards the Mexican locksmith, believing that he would give the key to one of his "homies", and she then kicked him out of the house. This movie was basically the epitome of the existence of race and the toll that it takes in our society.

This movie brought up many interesting ideas that we have discussed in class. The issue of race as a social construct was a prevalent issue in the movie. Race of the characters was simply just assumes by others- there was no biological evidence that the one guy was black and the one girl was Chinese. Another idea I did not initially see was the concept of sociological imagination. This movie emphasized that we are all connected in some way and that we all play a small part in the bigger picture. By enforcing the idea of race and something that separates us, the characters in the movie thus did not nothing to try to help the end of racism, and were therefore sociologically unaware. This movie made me realize that as much as we like to think it doesn't, race does indeed play a huge role in our entire society and that we are affected by race, even if we are not racist ourself.

My service experience

Today, I went to Bernie's Book Bank in Lake Forest for about an hour, even though it was originally planned for two hours, but we were let out early. When Bary, our friend, and I got there, they had us sign in and then began to tell us the process of the book sorting and bagging. We organized the books by grades, preschool to sixth grade, and threw the books into the correct bin. Then, we loaded them onto a table where we labeled them with Bernie's Book Bank stickers, and then began putting six books into separate bags and loaded them onto carts to be brought to schools in low-income areas. The number of books that went through our hands was astounding. I probably saw about 1,000 books go through the "assembly" line, only in one hour! This was a really fun experience and I plan on going back again!

This experience taught me a lot about society and the way in which the world operates. This experience showed me that, although it is often hard to realize, especially in our materialistic American society, that there are people that are still in need of books. Books of all things. It amazes me that I grew up with about four or five book shelves in my house, went to the library all the time, and read at school, and at the same time there were kids my age who didn't even know what a book was. I was thinking this when going through some of my favorite books as a kid today and I began to think about the issues of class that we discussed in sociology and this experience emphasized that although we'd like to think America does not have class, we most definitely do and these classes are defined by wealth. Those who, say, cannot afford books are in lower classes and those who can take their kids to book stores all the time are higher class. It is heartbreaking knowing that kids grow up in such poverty that they do not even know what a book or reading is. This experience also made me realize how there are so many people who care about giving to others. Those who volunteer have good sociological imagination and understand that the world is a whole lot bigger than just them and then they must help others in order to be an active member of a society. This experience was very rewarding and allowed me to apply sociology to an actual situation. I can't wait to do it again!

Week 16- The Human Race.

This week in sociology, we discussed race as a sociological construct, as opposed to the perceived notion that race is a biologically determined. We discovered that there truly is no biological difference between these races and that different fingerprints, for example, are not common in one "race", but rather vary over a wide spectrum of people. We also determined that race changes from culture to culture, making race relative as a social construct. In Brazil, for example, they have multiple types of race that are solely determined by physical characteristics, rather than America'a way of distinguishing race by ancestry. Therefore, we decided that ones race would change from culture to culture- race is not limited to one specific definition, nor is it something that should separate us all. We are all apart of one race: the human race.

This week was yet another insightful week in sociology. I learned things that I already knew about race, but this week I realized how dramatic sociological construction of reality really is on one's own perception of reality. In the American culture, we are faced with the task to try to overcome racism, especially due to our eventful past involving racism. However, I realized that we are all under the misconception that racial differences is a huge problem in our society. However, I believe that if we enforced more ideas on how race is simply sociological, there would be less emphasis on racial discrimination, as well as less differences between races. I do think the idea of race is ultimately timeless, no matter how hard we try, but I do believe that as a united society, we should be able to overcome some of the obstacles that race brings.