The Final Blog

In the beginning of the year in our first blog we answered the question, "Who Am I?" 

Now at the end of the year I want to say that my answer to my first blog has changed. Going through Sociology and the service experiences I have done I feel that I have grown as a person. I got new insight on why certain people do certain things and why they act the way that they do. This class has taught me to be open minded and accept people for who they are because we don't know their background so we shouldn't jude them. This class has taught me to accept people for who they are no matter what their skin color is because deep down in the inside we are all the same. 

Overall, I just want to say that Sociology was one of the best classes that I have ever taken. It has taught me to think of questions I would have never fathomed about other people and more importantly about myself. 

Crash

One of my all time favorite movies we watched in Sociology this week was called Crash. What I really liked about this movie, aside from the funny scenes, was that it had a lesson. It touched on explicit and implicit racism. Instead the movie following one character throughout the whole film this movie followed several characters and how they act in society. The movie followed: two white male cops, two married couples (white couple and black couple), a Persian family, a Hispanic family, a black detective and his brother who gets into trouble and his mom addicted to drugs and his female partner and Ludacris who steals cars throughout the movie. 

In the movie you can see how a persons race can affect how they act towards another person. 

Some examples are: 

-In the beginning of the movie when the two white male cops pull over the black married couple because they thought that they were doing something wrong just because of the color of their skin.

-When the Persian dad walks into his store and sees that it has been trashed he automatically assumes it was the Hispanic guy who came in the day before to fix his lock. He assumes the worse that the Hispanic guy gave the key away to one of his "homies" so they could go back and trash his store. 

-When the white male cop picked up the detective's brother, who is friends with Ludacris in the movie and they both go around stealing cars, and they are having a conversation and the cop was shocked to hear that he liked playing hockey. The cop only picked him up because he was trying not to judge him by his race but deep down he still had his doubts because of the way he was dressed and how torn his clothes were so when he started reaching for his pocket the cop thought he might be pulling out a gun and immediately shot him. Implicitly the cop was judging him based on his race and because of it he killed an innocent man. 

-The black married couple having an argument over who is blacker

-Ludacris at the end of the movie releasing the chinamen chained in the back of the van instead of selling them 

-the white male cop calling a black lady about his father's troubles and when the cop got upset he started saying how upset he was that there were probably three other white men before her that could have done her job better

All these examples just show how implicit and explicit racism existed throughout the movie. Society makes us have judgments about people based on their skin color, which makes us think if they are good or bad based on those judgments. 

Post 15: Race as a social construction

RACE DOES NOT EXIST!

Throughout this week in sociology we have been emphasizing how race does not exist but is biological. We like to categorize people by the color of their skin and say that this is there race. You can't just look at the color of a person's skin and automatically assume you know what they are even though that is what we all do. When you see a dark skinned person you can't just assume they are African American same thing with a light skinned person you cannot just say they are white.
This is constantly happening to me. When people first meet me they automatically think I am Mexican just because I have brown skin or because my face looks Mexican. Some people also think I look Indian because I am brown but once I say no to both guesses they safely assume I am Filipino, well only the ones who actually know how Filipinos "look".

One new thing I learned in class this week is how different people depending on where they live get more vitamin D than others this also explains why people are light skinned and why others are dark skinned. The closer you are to the equator the more melanin you have in your body which is a pigment making it user for the body to absorb vitamin D. Using me as an example I was born and raised in the Philippines which if you look in the picture below is very close to the equator. In the picture you can see how the further from the equator you are the less likely you are to absorb melanin in your body which means you are generally light skinned and vice versa if you are closer to the equator. This all shows how race truly does not exist and it is all just biological.

Post 14: New vs. Old Money & Monopoly

One way that we were shown how this is represented in real life is by playing a game of Monopoly. Each player represented a social class: upper class, middle class, and the working class. The person who represented the upper class had the most money and the person that represented the working class had the least amount of money. In reality the upper class the person with the most amount of money was probably new money because they didn't earn any of it they just had the money because their family probably has the money so the money was just passed down to them while the working class has to work for their money.

Throughout the game you just saw the person who represented the upper class had the most amount of money and just kept getting more the people who represented the lower class just kept losing their money. According to the rules of the U.S. structure of how social class and money works shows the wealthy just always stay wealthy while the lower class or the poor always stay poor. Though, some do move up to the middle class they still will never be with the upper class.

Community Service 5/10

I volunteered at the same soup kitchen as last time, A Just Harvest, and I think the second time around was even better. There were two others with me from the last group who volunteered again and it felt great knowing familiar faces. Once we arrived at the soup kitchen again it was the same task meet three new people and get to know them. This time I wasn't shy. I was able to approach several people and have conversations with them. One lady I talked to had a whole stack of papers of drawings that she drew herself. She was very funny and even gave me some of her drawings. They were incredible. The second time around the lady that was in charge of the whole thing told us three that attended the soup kitchen last time to inform everyone of what to expect and just help them out if they needed.
I was surprised to see so many familiar places in the soup kitchen, I thought I wouldn't remember any of them but I did.

This time instead of putting the food on the plate I was in charge of the dessert plate. So everyone's meal came with a meal and a dessert plate. For dessert some had brownies, cookies, scones, and each sweet dessert came with a fruit.

At the end of the day only a few of them actually came up and said thank you to us after their meal and it felt really nice to be acknowledge for what you did, especially something you volunteered for. Many of them were thankful and said how nice it was for us to take time out and come down here and help out.

One thing that I thought was funny is how a lot of the people asked us where we were from and once we told them they always wanted to know how many miles away it was. I thought it was just really interesting how most have probably never been away from Chicago so once we told them Lincolnshire or Buffalo Grove most didn't know where that was but once we told them about 30 miles they had some idea where it was.

Overall, the second time around in the soup kitchen was really beneficial and I enjoyed spending my time and volunteering there.

Community Service 4/26

For my community service I went to a soup kitchen in Chicago called A Just Harvest. We left at about 2:30 and arrived there at 3:45. We were really early so we stopped somewhere to get food first since the soup kitchen doesn't open until 4:30. I had never been to a soup kitchen before so I did not know what to expect. My thoughts were that everyone was just homeless so they had to get food at a soup kitchen. I was a bit nervous at first because you would think that we were in a bad neighborhood in Chicago and you didn't really know what to expect. But when we arrived there and the main coordinator talked to us about the people coming in I felt safer. She told us that not everyone that comes to a soup kitchen is homeless most of them use all their money from their jobs to pay for their bills and so they had no money left to buy food so they have to come to a soup kitchen to eat.
I was excited and nervous to start. Our first task was to walk up to three different people get their names and engage in conversation with them. None of us knew what to do. We all looked at each other dumbfounded because I sensed all of us felt uncomfortable to do so, but in the end we all pulled through. It was a shock to see how nice everyone was and how happy they were talking to us (and we mainly let them do the talking because we saw how happy it made them).
My job for was putting the food on the plate, well the first part of it. I put the rice and the main course on the plate then passed it down where someone else put the vegetables on the plate. This was also accompanied with a desert place. One perception we all had was that the food might not taste that good but once we saw we were all surprised. The food looked really good and smelled fantastic as well.

Overall, I walked away with a great experience and am really happy that I decided to volunteer at this soup kitchen. Everyone who volunteers there regularly were just really great people around and made everything more comfortable and helped us all feel like we belonged there and didn't treat us any different.

Social Class

This week in Sociology we talked about social class. We played a game and watched a movie on different social classes and how others perceived them.

The game we played was s metaphor to show how people that have more money have more opportunities. At first it seemed to be fair since we all had the same amount of coins to start with but then as we kept playing only a few were left with a lot of coins and almost everyone was left at the bottom with nothing. You can see this more with a graph showing a big gap in the middle because you are either at the top and very wealthy or you are at the bottom with little or no money.

The movie we watched showed how people in different classes do not like to interact with each other. Each class felt that the other was always looking down on them. Everyone feels that they do not understand the other class. But really what separates our classes? Is it money? Where we live? I think it just what we are given and what we decided to do with it that really separates us from one another.