Its kind of universal

When thinking about race most of us think about black and white. Why wouldn’t we? When looking about at things like the civil rights movement and the race riots those are the two prominent entities involved. But if anything can be said about racism is that it encompasses many different people and colors a religion. In crash it wasn’t just the white officers pulling over the black couple, or the black boys stealing a white person’s car. It was also a Mexican man being constantly considered a bad person because of his identity. No one expected better from him because of the stereotype given to most Mexicans, in this movie specifically it was "cheater" and "gangbanger". The Iranian man had it even worse because people automatically considered him connected with the terrorists, which is a common misconception in this country. All of these characters put together showed how much discrimination in America persists against everybody. It’s not right, but that doesn’t change anything. This kind of hits close to home for me because the reason my family and I had to leave Ukraine was because of religious intolerance. My dad grew up having to fight people he thought were his friends because they made religious slurs. That’s the reason im in Krav Maga in the first place. My dad says that one day when im older and living in a community that isn’t as heavily Jewish, someone’s going to make a comment and I am going to have to fight, just like he did. And I will.

Reality of Racism

In the beginning of the week we started talking about racism and we went into this long conversation about how race is a socially constructed idea, not a biological fact. This didn’t surprise me because I learned it last year in human geography but it’s just a really interesting topic to think about. I mean everyone refers to race as if it’s an inborn characteristic of skin color; it’s just how people think. I means my own mom, when telling me about the Holocaust, said that Hitler was trying to turn a religion into a race. I was twelve at the time and asked what race was. She told me it’s a really complicated thing having to do with ancestry and skin color. I can’t make any generalizations about this because she was taught in the USSR, but it makes sense to me that others might think like this too. Race is a huge part of our culture; it has to be if a word such as racism exists. Racism is almost always perceived as one skin color against another, most associate racism with the civil rights movement. It’s just natural to think of race in this way, but what strikes me is that it’s natural to think of race at all. Who cares what color or ethnicity or whatever someone is? I feel like it’s just another in the mundane category of ways humans try to put themselves into smaller and smaller groups. Everyone wants to feel like they’re a part of something bigger, so why not make their category even larger by adding more to it. Race, age, gender, religion...etc...Kind of never ending isn’t it?

Just a game?

So this week we played monopoly in class, as a child I used to love that game. I thought it was all about making money and bankrupting others, only part of that still holds true. The version we played was meant to simulate real life social classes and we were trying to either stat where we were at or climb up in social class. I was in the lower upper class and it was pretty easy for me to stay where I was because I already had a lot of money and property. But the people below me kept on losing money and it was insanely difficult for them to stay out of bankruptcy. I never really thought about this in real life. I knew there were social classes, of course, and that some people had more money then others. But I didn’t think about how hard people try to maintain where they are. I mean we lose money everyday on simple stuff like food and clothes, but then again it’s not always the simple stuff. People like luxury, even in food and clothes. So if you have money you constantly lose it to health and label concerns. With all of this going on it’s not a wonder people try so hard to stay where they are at. My family went from having nothing in Ukraine, to being middle, middle class here. I’ve realized my whole life how hard my parents try but we're still like everyone else. We spend money on things and it’s a wonder we still are where we are. I want new things, so does my brother and so do my parents, thankfully we have the money to buy them. But if we keep buying them will we always have the money? If life is a big monopoly game, then as I have noticed most of the time the rich stay afloat and the rest sink below them.

People like us

In class we watched a movie called people like us about the perception of different social classes in society. This video really irritated me. Everyone ahs strived for so many years to be equal and not have money matter and look where it got us? Snobby rich guys wondering how "these people got in"! Honestly? This is kind of ridiculous! People separate themselves based on everything these days. They try to live in a community that is primarily of similar people, my own family when moving here wanted to live in a mainly Jewish community. If it’s not race, its religion, if it’s not religion its culture, if not culture then what? Money? Of course richer people are going to want bigger houses and such, but this movie just made it seem like they are so distraught at being around even the middle section middle class, as if they aren’t as good as them. The lady that married wealthy and decided to teach others to be wealthy, or act it at least kind of bothered me too. She was trying to hard to fit into another social circle even though her husband obviously didn’t care that she wasn’t from the upper middle class. Everyone puts so much more pressure on themselves then they really have to. I remember a year ago, I went out with this guy and his family to a French restaurant. I felt so out of place because it was really fancy and had a million and one forks and such. His mom kept trying to help me but it made me feel as if I wasn’t good enough. I admit I should've been calmer about it because in worrying I turned into yet another person that thinks its ok to think of people in terms of their social class.

Extreme Deviance

We watched a video where a man spent thirty days, well actually only 25, in jail being treated like any other inmate. The jail itself really surprised me. It was absolutely dehumanizing. Some of there prisoners didn't have a thing coming out of the wall to sleep on, they had to shower in front of everyone and they weren't even allowed to go outside. These men were living an absolutely non-human existence and some of them even had bigger needs that should have been addressed. There was one man in there with a heroine addiction going through withdrawal, he needed actual help but it wasn’t until he got to the other prison that he got it. Another thing that really struck me was that after release two prisoners, the heroine guy and the old respected guy ended up back in jail. The had seemed so promising and I thought their freedom was a sure thing but I was wrong. They don’t really rehabilitate them in normal jails, which I believe is a mistake because how are they supposed to go back and interact with normal society after that if they’re treated as less then people and get nothing out of it. Another aspect of this video that really scared me was the guy going through heroic withdrawal; I have a friend that used to do drugs and it got pretty bad but they're clean now and have been for a few years. It was one of my friends from back in Ukraine. After seeing the heroic guy go through withdrawal, I called my friend and basically threatened him if he ever gets back on drugs.

Saints and Roughnecks

So a major topic discussed in our short week was the reading Saints and Roughnecks, where students were treated differently for doing the same thing because of the way they went about it. The "Saints" were upper middle class kids with good grades who would ditch class regularly but do it in such a way that they only seemed better as students. The "Roughnecks’" were just as deviant but they didn’t have as good a reputation and weren’t as creative about it. So they were labeled as "the bad kids". The sad thing about this story is that it applies to real life too. If you're labeled a "good kid" by society (because of who you are or how you act) you do tend to get the benefit of the doubt more often and often times are treated better. People expect more from you so a mistake is a mistake, while for other kids their mistakes may be seen as life choices. I'm not sure why but this bothers me. I've known this stuff for a long time, but seeing it in black and white just made me feel horrible about society. Money and grades shouldn’t mean everything about a person. What you were born into shouldn’t determine how society looks at you, but this is a fact of life. You judge a person twelve seconds after meeting them, you look at: hair, clothes and manners. It’s a human trait and it is how it’s always been. The reason these boys were treated differently was only skin deep, but it changed them for the rest of their lives because they learned that society will never expect anything different from them. So the "Saints" were successful and the "Roughnecks" were not. I realize of course that we all do this. I've had circumstances where I had to go talk to a teacher and ask for a favor, and I knew I would get it because I’m usually quiet and don’t disturb the class. My friends say that teachers like that because they do all there homework and don’t make much noise. It’s a fact of life; we are all stereotyped by how we act. And due to that we know what we can get away with and what is expected of us. It’s not fair but it’s true. I had a friend who was failing a class and her teacher hated giving extra credit. But she sat in the front, did all her homework and never disturbed the class. So when she went in and asked fro extra credit the teacher gave it to her, but no one else in the class. Because she was deemed the "good kid" that tried hard and deserved it. But she never studied, so technically this stereotype was false. But the teacher would never have known it.

Aikido

So in class this week one of the topics that stuck out to me was the concept of Aikido; fighting by simply defending yourself but not bringing harm to another person. It was strange because we have been trained since birth that fighting is both parties equally trying to harm each other. So the concept of standing there and defending but not advancing isn't something you would normally think of. Especially me because I'm a Krav Maga fighter, one of our main goals is to defend and advance at the same time (aka block and punch), because we are taught that you cant risk the person coming back to try and hurt you again. That's why when we were talking about Aikido i kind of didn't fully understand it. If you don't punch back, like i was taught to do, how can you inflict harm on the person so they don't hurt you again? But the idea of Aikido is that you don't want to inflict harm, because then both parties are angry and the fight will go on or your attacker will pick another victim. The idea is to show him or her that you can hurt them if you need to, but you don't want to. That way they'll walk away peacefully. This just keeps making em think of what I've been taught, my dad has been telling me since birth that if someone tries to hurt me i should hurt them back and worse so they know not to mess with me. It always made sense to me, but i never looked at it as perpetuating the violence, i just looked at it as self defense. But with the concept of Aikido self defense means nothing more then defend yourself, which is interesting.

Society's Expectations

For years I've heard about how girls are pressured by the media to look or act a certain way, but I never thought boys were under the same kind of pressure. All we hear is girls have to be skinnier, taller, prettier, have straight hair, have curly hair, have this, have that, do this, do that. But honestly how often do we hear these kinds of things about a guy? A lot less often, but its still there, we just don’t recognize it as much. Girls always talk to each other about how they feel and what they hate and want to change and magazines even show us how to do that, but you never hear guys saying "I need to be tougher" "I need to be stronger"....they think this and act on it, but it isn’t as noticeable because they have been taught from birth that it isn’t ok to show weakness or sensitivity even in the form of words. So why girls make their fears much more obvious and show that they are miserable by peoples expectations, guys are much more quiet about it and so the effect on them is subtle, but its there. They are constantly told they need to be tough and that has so many negative connotations. If you watch today’s media you see boys portrayed as violent criminals, but always with respect. They fight and go to jail with the admiration of their peers, because in movies their actions are always justified. So in real life guys try to find justification for their actions too. Is it ok to have a gun? Yeah of course because that’s an action of a man! What if it’s not safe? A real man can handle it. There is always an excuse for everything because just like us girls have been taught that everything is ok in the pursuit of beauty, guys have been taught that everything is ok in the pursuit of respect. It starts for them from birth as well. I have a three year old brother and since he hit two every time he cries, while trying to appease him, I hear my mom, dad and grandparents saying, "Come on now, you're a boy, boys don’t cry". This bother’s me because he's little and also because I know how dangerous it can be for guys to bottle up their feelings because they don’t think its ok to share them, I have a friend who kept everything and it blew up in his face, I cant say more, but it ruined so much for him, just because he was taught to keep everything inside. It’s not always possible for a guy to be extremely strong, smart, active, and brave, all at the same time anymore then it is for all girls to be a size 00, it is for some, but not all.

Gender Roles

This week in class we talked about many different aspects of today’s society, but I found gender roles to be one of the more interesting ones. A chart was put on the projector of what girls and guys are expected to act like. It said girls should be dumb and weak, but pretty. Guys should be strong and smart and attractive based on their achievements.  It looked like something made in the fifties. Because back then the girl stayed home and cooked for her husband and did nothing else with her life. These were the values of society back then. I didn’t think that they were society's values now but we were told its still sometimes speculated that they are. I hate that I really do. Because thoughts like these are the reason women still make 15 cents less for every dollar a man makes at the same jobs. Not only that but they lead to the objectification of women, because they supposed to be protected by men, so men can do whatever they want. It all infuriates me because I am a Krav Maga fighter and in being so I am by no means weak. I don’t need to be protected and in Krav I get the same respect as a fighter as any of the guys there. So labels like weak bother me because they are so far from the truth. I have guy friends and not all of them are strong or extremely smart, but no one cares. Just like no one should look to girls to be weak, pretty, bimbos.

Socialization

So far this unit we have been talking about socialization. One lesson that really intrigued me was the one about isolated children. I already knew that we are shaped by our environment, since that was the main focus of most of our lessons so far this year, but this lesson stuck out to me. I didn’t think that without nurturing children could come out to be mentally disabled; never did it cross my mind that a child could be born normal, and due to not being given proper attention would change mentally. If asked before I would have said that these children are probably handicapped socially, but I would think that they are fully capable mentally. Environmental factors, in all our lessons, seemed to only affect social behavior (like that lady that left her baby outside in a stroller in a restaurant in New York). That is why this whole idea of idea of isolated children stuck to me so much. It’s a scary fact to think that there are people out there horrible enough to ignore the basic needs of their children, much less that these people could end any hope their child could ever have of leading a normal life. It’s horrifying that because they are who they are, they can ruin the lives of what would be normal, healthy human beings. I babysit a lot and I’ve never been ion a house where a child didn’t have heaps of toys and books; everything possible for the child to develop into a healthy member of society. Obviously I knew that abuse existed but this is so far beyond child abuse it’s almost sickening.

The Art of Doing Nothing

We had an assignment this week that asked us to go to a public place and just stand there and try to clear our minds. Doing nothing didn't seem like it would be too bad since most of us associate doing nothing with relaxing or being lazy. We are just supposed to stand there and think and do absolutely nothing. This proves to be excruciatingly difficult because it has become a part of our culture to use every minute to its optimal potential. Even relaxing requires setting aside a specific slot of time that we know we will relax in. While i was doing the nothing assignment i had trouble clearing my head, it just proved so hard not to people watch. I was almost tempted to look up at the sky just to stop my thoughts, but that would be counterproductive to the assignment. After doing the assignment i thought about how it reminds me of my little brother. He's 3 and he doesn't care when he's supposed to do what. He has spur of the moment decisions and just acts on them. I know this is because he's little, but it just seems to be such an easy and carefree lifestyle. Its the complete opposite of any American adult life, so consumed with time that the idea of putting something off or not doing it at all is far fetched because they just don't have the time to do it later.

Culture Shock

Of all the ideas we've learned this week the one that I took to the most was culture shock. This is when a person is submerged into a different culture and everything is strange to them and they aren’t sure how to act. The reason this stuck to me is because I experience it on almost a daily basis with my grandma. We moved from Ukraine 13 years ago and she lives with us. Everything I do she has to criticize because it seems weird to her. When I went to homecoming and had to get my date a flower for his lapel she was so beyond confused she thought was making it up. I used to think that because of globalization American culture had spread to most of the world, but that’s not completely true. The former Soviet Union and China would never have accepted such ideas and so some people will never understand us. So just like that lady who thought it was perfectly normal to leave her baby outside in New York, many people will experience culture shock as it is natural when you move from place to place.

Culture Shock

Today in class culture, both material and non-material, was compared to a fish bowl. One of the things that stuck out to me in this metaphor was the idea of culture shock. I knew, from Human Geography, that culture shock is when people with one culture are brought into a different one and they experience "Culture shock" because everything is so different. But the fishbowl really got me thinking about it. The example used was the owner wanting the fish to swim into the castle, but that’s not what the fish wants because this wouldn’t have occurred out in the ocean that it is used to. This aggravates the owner. In real life thought I never thought about people being aggravated when others are confused due to them being new to the surroundings. Stevenson ahs exchange students all the time and most people are really nice about it. They treat the new students well because they know that these kids dot speak the language or aren’t used to the way things are. But then I thought about my new neighbor, she is an exchange student from Germany. She speaks English pretty well but she struggles with some words and concepts. I was talking to her about homecoming and she said they didn’t have anything like that back in Germany and she didn’t really know what to wear or how to act. Whets more I found it difficult to explain some things to her because she didn’t have the vocabulary to understand. This wasn’t really aggravating because I could see that she was trying really hard, but I could see how it would irritate someone if they really needed to get a concept through to her.

A Bronx Tale

We watched a Bronx Tale and one idea that really stuck out to me was the racism concept in this movie. The Italians had so many problems in their own neighborhood but yet they still went out and found trouble in the African American neighborhood simply because they were racist. But simply isn’t the right word. It wasn’t simple at all! The reason behind this really got me thinking, I mean this was the eighties people were more progressive then this, but then I realized something. It may not have been solely about race. The Italian neighborhood had a fear instilled in every member since birth about Sunny and the kind of people that surround him. They were scared of him but they couldn’t do anything about him. Which led me to think that maybe with the African Americans, the Italians finally felt they had some control. That they could attack someone and not know for a fact that they themselves would die after. It may have been a control issue since they themselves couldn’t control their own streets. I mean everyone needs some control in their life. if things go bad at school, for instance, I have had times when I come home really irritated and lash out at my family because I cant lash out at  a teacher who failed me or something. It’s the sense of control we all need over some aspect of our lives.

Where do i stand?

This week we did an exercise where we had to write down what groups we identify ourselves in, I had the basic: family, friends, Stevenson, sports; categories down but when we had to choose which ones represented us and influenced us the most I started to think. Most of us would identify ourselves in similar ways (sister, brother, son daughter, student, classmate ect.) so what makes something influence one of us more then it does another? Why am I so influenced by my friends while someone else who also has a lot of friends is influenced greatly by Stevenson? I mean isn’t this where society's influence is greatest? I came to the realization that while society is important and ties us all together, it’s our specific environments that change what is most important to us. I grew up in a house where a strong emphasis was put on having a healthy balance between everything you do. For instance I have a job and I watch my brother and I’m a fighter and i'm a student and I hang out with friends; all of these things shape who I am and make my role as a friend stand out because it is one that I need to always remember to make time for it. But someone else may have been told, since childhood, that nothing is more important then education. We were raised in the same society, but our environments are very different. I now see the difference between environment and the society. I then began to think about people who are strained to have more then one role as their main one. So they might be influenced by sports and school and strive to achieve there ultimate potential in both areas, I never had that problem but with this understanding i’m worried about these people! If it’s so hard to fit into one role, how can they always manage to fit into two?

social construction of reality

The spitting demo we did in class really interested me. I already knew that our environment shaped us but I didn’t really pay attention to how much it shapes our reality. If we had grown up seeing people drink the spit of others out of cups we would have seen nothing wrong in it. I don’t really like this. I don’t like the idea that society can change my views so much, that how I see things isn’t really how I see them, but how everyone else told me to see them. This made me think about my last year Human Geography class; we had a whole unit on different cultures of the world. Their was this one particular picture we saw that I felt was a perfect example of social construction of reality; it was this man in this one tribe who's bottom lip protruded several inches in front of the rest of his face because he had had a lip plate there for years to make it that way.  Everyone in my class instinctively said "eww" or "ouch" under their breathes because this was something so strange for us. It looked kind of gross to us, but in their culture that was a symbol of a great warrior and he was considered the epitome of an attractive man. If we had all lived in that society we would have seen that lip plate idea as normal an acceptable and found it weird that in America regular people and important people all look the same. Our social construction of reality would be different. I’ve realized from the first two sociology units that environment is everything.

Social Imagination

 When we went over social imagination in class, I was a little taken aback. We've always been told we are shaped by our environment but the Outliers story really opened my eyes. It's hard to look at a story like that and realize that everything would be very different if this little town hadn't been formed. These people would have been just like the rest of America and would never have shown the world how much we affect each other. At first this shocked me because the concept of social imagination is kind of scary; we would be completely different people if we lived somewhere else. I started thinking about this and it reminded me a little of my grandmother. She was raised in Soviet Ukraine, and her surroundings greatly affected her. She doesn’t believe in religion because she was never allowed to, everything is supposed to be extremely clean because they had so few nice things back then that they wanted to show that they can keep what they do have in order, and she still sometimes worries about little things, such as someone dropping an apple, because back then they had so little. This is how she was affected by her society and the social imagination is very different from mine because of where I grew up and my influences. Such as my school and my friends in America.

About Me

Hey! I'm Victoria and i'm a 16 year old junior. I was born in Kiev, Ukraine and moved to America when i was 3 years old. Because of this I am bilingual; i speak Russian and English. I am a Krav Maga fighter; krav maga is the self defense they teach the Israeli army. I've been doing it for a few years now and i really like it. I'm testing to move up a level as soon as i can. It means a lot to me because i can see myself becoming capable of defending myself in any situation. Walking down a dark alley in Chicago at 2 am doesn't scare me. I'm in Krav because of my dad, in Ukraine all your problems were solved with your fists, so he wants me to be able to defend myself. He is the biggest influence in my life, he sacrificed so much so my mom, my brother, and I could have all opportunities possible. My family is really important to me because we are really close, we have a lot of family parties and they ply a big role in my life. As a person i would say im outgoing but i love to have fun, which is probably why i get my friends in some weird situations. I plan to go to the University of Wisconsin and study business. That's basically it about me!