Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Discussing American Culture: Thrive, GGTU & Nothing

HW: Read and annotate Just Mercy chapters 3-4 for tomorrow.
Thrive
As students enter, please take out your reading and answer the following questions:

1.  What 2 sections did you find most interesting or applicable to your life? In other words, what 2 sections do you want to remember as you get older? (look over your reading and circle two)
Community    Workplace    Social Life    Financial Life      Home         Self

2.  Please answer the following 3 questions from the first section that you circled:
a)What suggestions from this section do find insightful/valuable?  How might you incorporate these suggestions into your life in the future?

b)What cultural values from the Kohl reading might conflict with that you wrote about above? (use the list of values)

3.  Please answer the following 3 questions from the second section that you answered:
a)What suggestions from this section do find insightful/valuable?  How might you incorporate these suggestions into your life in the future?

b)What cultural values from the Kohl reading might conflict with that you wrote about above? (use the list of values)




Nothing Discussion 
For a brief discussion from McGrane's book, click here.  For a more in depth explanation of the nothing experiment, see this post.
4.  Did anyone experience a realization of any sort?  Did anything occur to you?

5.  Was this difficult to do?  Why/why not?
  
6.  How was your doing nothing perceived by those around you?

7.  Identify values that are contradictory to U.S. values from the film God Grew Tired of Us.
US Value        How does it contradict with the Lost Boys?

8.  Look at the list of values that Americans hold.  Identify American values that might complement each other.  These are called value clusters.  List them here:

Value Cluster: ­­­­­­­­­­­

Now look for American values that might contradict the other American values.  These are called value contradictions.  List them here:


Value Contradiction:




Monday, September 25, 2017

A Knee into the Gut of America


This past weekend we saw the Colin Kaepernick controversy of taking a knee during the national anthem explode to a social issue across multiple sports.

Some questions sociology can help us understand:

Why are they protesting?

This really eloquent op-ed was written in the NY Times by Eric Reid, one of the original players who took a knee (pictured on the right, Reid is the player on the left).

The protest originated with Kaepernick who was protesting police brutality and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.  The BLM movement is not anti-police.  It is a movement to say, "Hey our lives should matter as much as anyone else's."  The reason that they do not feel equal is because the high number of people of color killed without anyone being held accountable.

Here is a website that compiles a comprehensive list of police-related violence.  See https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ for the homepage and this link has a list of unarmed victims who were killed.

Here are a few telling stats that should help give you a better understanding of the issue:



And this link to the Society Pages shows the rates of police killings as well.

Additionally, the Washington Post has a study of all police shootings.

Here is my post after the Ferguson riot. The post details shootings of black men (Trigger Warning - it shows violent encounters between police and civilians.)

Below is a video of sociologist Rashawn Ray explaining that the issue being protested is about all Americans, especially black Americans being treated equally and justly under the law.  


Whites may find it easier to ignore the protests or be annoyed by them.

The first reason that everyone might not understand the protests is because of the misconstrued message that gets jumbled by the words the media uses.  There are numerous examples of the media calling it a "national anthem protest."  However, while the protest is happening during the national anthem, it is NOT a protest of the national anthem.  This may be a nice connection to the Sapir Whorf hypothesis and the importance of words as well as the construction of cultural meaning by the media.  Fox News' Shep Smith explains it here.

Secondly, if you are white or you have never faced discrimination and if you do not have family or friends who are people of color then you may not understand the discrimination faced by minorities.  The thing is that the black community understands the issues in ways that the majority does not. If you are not black or don't have black friends, you may not see the impact of all of the racism day in and day out: the racist language and dog whistles used by the president and the impact by police killing people of color at a much higher rate than whites. If you are white, you can walk away from this issue because it doesn't affect you. So taking the knee is a way of saying "hey - if you are paying attention, we are hurting here. We are afraid. We feel unequal." This is an example of ingroups and outgroups that sociologists talk about.

Here is a link to the Ford Foundation which has a quiz that can help you see how insulated you are; that is, if you are insulated from discrimination, you don't have to worry about it. Sociologists call this privilege.

Think with a sociological imagination. If you are a person of color, you are influenced by the racism in America. Then think with sociological mindfulness - what can you do to fight racism? What are the little ways that you might allow it to perpetuate?

Protests have often been unpopular until the mainstream/majority understands the issues. Should blacks still sit in the back of buses? Should they use a separate drinking fountain? Those seem like ridiculous questions but at the time of the protests, polls showed a majority of Americans opposed those changes. Counter-culture is often unpopular. It upsets the current norms and status quo of society. It makes people notice norms and values that are inconvenient. But that's how society changes. See the charts below showing how unpopular protests of the sixties were? Imagine if those protests never happened and those norms never changed!





How is the President involved?

The President weighed in on the protests at both a rally last week and over twitter.
Read the President's comments and think about them from a symbolic interactionist, conflict and functional perspective. What is the meaning behind the comments? Who has the power and what is the President calling on those with power to do? What is the function of sports in general or the NFL in particular? How is this This post from CNN explains the coded language. Whose culture is he talking about? What heritage? Is this counter culture? And don't forget the importance of language and shared meaning. This is an example or Saphir-whorf hypothesis and that words matter.


And the President has a long, long history of racist beliefs. See this history.

In the President's own words:


But what about the flag? Are these protests disrespectful to the flag?

There are countless examples of disrespecting the flag everyday in America, but they are not raised as an issue unless people of color are asking to be treated equally. In other words, there are numerous folkways that get violated everyday. The norms of flag respect only become mores when a minority race is infused.

Additionally, dozens of veterans have explained that they support the right to take a knee - indeed that's why they served our country! This is a particularly poignant explanation of it.



ESPN video - Here is a great video short by Kwame Alexander called "Take a Knee". It is an inspirational slam poem set to video about all of the issues mentioned above.