Sociology

FDOC:

o Definition to USE: Systemic study of Human behavior and social groups

▪ Question: Why is Joe depressed? Can be a sociological question on a

broader sense, but is vague enough to be an innate psychological

question

▪ Broad social claims cannot be used for individual events, though

social patterns are vastly important (think: public policy)

▪ Social facts= good predictors of individual

choices/behavior/outcomes but are not automatic, sociologists do

not propose these conclusions

▪ Question: Which is worse: High Divorce or High Unemployment? Can

be a sociological question because it’s looking at a pattern that can

be measured, BUT the use of the word “worse” are automatically

making the question to be subjective

▪ Correlation is UNEQUAL to causation, they can appear to be related

but cannot be related but the direction of correlation, can be both

ways but can also be not

▪ Mechanisms {Independent impacting Dependent variables}

▪ What genes predispose one to caner? It is not at a glance sociological

question, BUT can be turned into one, carcinogenic habits declined

over time, and cancer is a Nature v. Nurture question with Socioeconomic AND Biological Factors

▪ A sociological question deals with social phenomena, and is a fairly

new discipline, we answer them as man through Supernatural

Determinism and Free Will

• That free will is determined by an individual’s given situations

• Sociology takes agency into a social context as a main object

of study (culture and structure)

o Structure of Opportunity

o DAY TWO

▪ The sociological imagination, the importance of context

• Adding complex complicates while also clarifying social

phenomena

• The difference between agency, culture, and societal structure

o Individual action, shared belief, and Societal

normality’s

• Ask yourself the explanatory patterns of individual decisions

o Ie: The agency that comes with not working out

▪ The structural convenience of unhealthy foods

being more readily available and cheap/ the

presence of food deserts

• Weight loss methods not being covered

by insurance

• The increase of portion sizes

▪ The cultural acceptance of high sugar foods

being considered normal as breakfast foods,

when sniping culture thing “whats normal”

• There is a social pattern when it comes to things like rape and

mass shootings

o Addition social shift in how many children people want

to have, and people are having kids at a much older age

• Mills point about History and Biography: you cannot

understand someone’s personal history without grasping the

larger context of their personal society

• The Breif History of Social Thought:

o Positivism:

▪ August Comte (1792-1857): Scientific

explanation based on observation, experiments,

and comparisons

• Stages of social thought: Theological,

Metaphysical, Positive

o Natural Laws:

▪ Adam Smith (1723-1790) and Thomas Malthus

(1766-1834)

• Human nature is selfish and greedy,

meant to breed itself into extinction

(proven false)

• Reification: current social order is

deemed “Natural”

o Social Darwinism:

▪ Essentialism: Helping poor people is

meaningless because they are essentially not

good enough to climb higher

▪ Racism: The core of racism is to justify inequality

o Actual Science (Modern Sociology)

▪ WEB DuBois: The Philadelphia Negra (1899)

▪ Emile Durkheim: Suicide (1897) and it’s social

patterns, loosely connected communities were

founded to have higher suicide rates

• The structure of a society effect the

outcomes of both of these things, not

directly caused by individual beliefs

DAY THREE

- The importance of Social constructs, pressures, and the impact that they hold on

given situations

- How structure and context change overtime

- Statistical facts are based on the reporting frequences more/as often as they are the

response of actual cases

- Some statistical measurements come from a basis of prejudice/biases can

influence shoddy sciences, can lead to missing information

- There is a guaranteed uncertainty in science (not an excuse to exclude data entirely)

- REAL research does not involve crowd searched information/forums

- THE WHEEL OF SCIENCE:

o Theories (known theories)

o Hypotheses: Must be a falsifiable claim, something must be quantified in a

measurable way

o Observations: Avoid conformation bias: the plural of anecdote is not

evidence, they may not be representative of the entire population, data

samples should have a equal amount of varying demographics/

proportionate to the amount in a given population

o Empirical Generalizations: Finding multiple cases that reinforce a bias is NOT

sufficient enough to prove any given hypothesis, correlations/causality need

comparisons

o Theory reformation

- Research is dependent on how independent Variables effect a dependent variable

via a mechanism

- Quantitative vs Qualitative Data

o Quantitative: Number based and more concrete i.e.: statistics

o Qualitative: Data based on interviews and surveys

- Data is dependent on Context and Perspective

o IN ADDITION: it is also highly dependent on the amount of a source that was

seen

o Being Aware of Conformation Bias: You cannot make a solid research claim

based in a collection of cherry-picked research

▪ Suitability of subconscious stereotypes and given narritive

• And a lack of thinking as to how racial biases and stereotypes

effect people

o Test old research to check to see if it is still relevant

Day Four

- Notes From Reading:

o The self develops over time

o You have an experience of yourself as a whole, and you have a self

o The Self is developed in consequence of your social surroundings and your

communities.

- Notes From Class: The Self and Society

o Questions:

▪ No media source is completely perfect, they are meant to walk you

through how they know their evidence is correct

▪ New York Times, broad well valued source, and The Gothamist

▪ The importance of not making assumptions

▪ Perceptions are always biased, and you have to be able to count

through things

▪ A small percentage of people cannot be used as a basis for the entire

population

▪ A perspective/agenda does not mean (necessarily) bad research

▪ Basic scientific method is applied to social sciences

o Lecture Itself

▪ “Entitlement” Vs. “Constraint”

• Entitlement demands what they want while constraint remains

meek and timid

▪ Personal experience vs. active observation. Empirical Research

▪ Conformation Bias: Cherry-picking your evidence

▪ Ethnocentrism: judging one’s culture based on the standards of their

own culture

▪ Moral Relativism: judging by the standards of the culture being

studied (Remember Big Charleene )

o Alternative Perspectives

▪ “Columbus Discovered America” vs “Columbus helped to discovered

a continent previously unknown to contemporary Europeans” /

“Columbus helped launched a violent invasion of an already

populated environment”

o Perpetual Inquiry/Conversation

▪ Empty Cynicism

▪ Naïve Gullibility

▪ Complexity and Change

o Circling back to the Self

▪ The Self separate from society does not exist

▪ One’s sense of self does not exist at birth

▪ One needs a community to have a sense of self established

▪ Wheel: Inner= what we’re born into, outer: things that can be

obtained/achieved, the separation of the two is very blury

• Inner

o Age:18

o Race: Black

o Ethnicity: African American

o Gender: Male

o Physical Abilities: Relatively Fit

o Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual

• Outer:

o Work B/R: N/A

o Income: N/A

o Marital Status: N/A

o Military Experience: N/A

o Religious Beliefs: Baptist

o Geographic information:

o Parental Status:

o Education:

▪ Disability is dependent on the society and how people see you

▪ How we see ourselves is partly dependent on how people see us

• There is a sense of reflexive self where we can become object

to themselves

• We can talk to ourselves, rehearse communication and

thinking

• We can, by definition, respond to ourselves

o The Generalized Other

▪ How the community determines the behavior of their individual

members

▪ How social norms and concepts end up affecting our behavior

▪ You’re imagining how others are conceptualizing YOU

• The thing that makes you want to protect your self image

• Would the idea of the generalized other apply to a society that

rejects traditional norms?

• Thinking about what other people’s roles are and what they’re

doing, are what make “games” work essentially (like

board/card games)

• Self-identity continues to exist outside of the presence of other

people

▪ The presentation of self

• Seeking the best response

• Seeking information about others

• Making assumptions based on your social setting

• Relying on assumption of persistence and generality of

psychological traits

- DAY Five

o Questions:

▪ How do certain qualities/ traits affect you for the rest of your life? They

are present in every interaction that you have (physically)

▪ Could it be said the alteration of ones presentation of themselves that

was described in the readings similar to code switching? The meaning

of code switching is based in altering the presentation of yourself,

they are going to have to adapt to the different cultures of other

people

o Interaction Rituals, and the Patterns of Society

▪ Maintaining social face/ helping other’s maintain theirs

▪ Seeking the help of others in order to maintain

▪ Frontstage (public) and Backstage (private)

▪ “Situations don’t define themselves”

• To feel out a situation, you do not know off rip what you can

and cannot talk about within a different situation, you feel that

out through interactions and familiarity

▪ “Institutions exist only in people’s minds”

• It’s the meaning that we tie to it, we treat it as real because

there is credit behind it

o Corrective Practices and Disruptions

▪ Reflexive/ joking/ comforting

▪ Avoiding embarrassment

▪ Compensation for discrediting occurrences

▪ Defensive (face-serving)

▪ Protective (helping others maintain face)

▪ Jokes (disruptions)

▪ Co-management of interaction often protects our selves

▪ Social orders set interaction rituals and condition social behaviors/

Societies create and organize selves

o Social Class

▪ “Americans are much more comfortable recognizing the power of

individual initiative than recognizing the power of social class”

▪ The secret to success/ longevity: For the most part it is LUCK

o Class and Individualism

▪ Achieved vs. Ascribed

▪ You ARE born into a given class

▪ Holds directionality (cause and effect)

▪ Causality: Cultural Pathology vs. economic opportunity

▪ Privilege is not the opposite of hard work, it weighs the impact of

mistakes

▪ Karl Marx and Clas Structure

▪ Different economic systems = determines class structures

▪ Legitimizing ideology (meritocracy)

▪ Capitalism: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat (working class)

▪ One’s relationship to the means of production

▪ This relationship holds an inherent conflict

• Businessman Goal: Profit= Sales – Cost (labor/wages)

• Workers Goal: High wages, higher wages (usually) yield lower

profit

▪ Max Weber (Vay-ber)

• Class-Wealth = Economic Capital

• Status: Prestige/ Knowledge or Cultural Capital ‘

• Party: Connections or Social Capital

▪ Creates different opportunities/ constraints

▪ Transmission of advantages from generation to generation

▪ Cultural Capital: Knowledge of norms, values, beliefs, and practices

• Credentials/ belonging in certain social groups/situations

• Tend to be inherited Frictionlessly

• Informal vs Formal

▪ SES: Socioeconomic status

Day Six:

- Questions:

o If a student was high income and went broke all of a sudden, would they

have the same chances as a low income kid now?

▪ All of the advantages they possess do not disappear

automatically, they still hold influence on the person’s life and

they will probably be okay, consequences would be different

depending on the family that they come from

o How is social class reevaluated when a major event renders it useless?

▪ It isn’t, it exposes vulnerability, but it does not necessarily change

the dynamics of wealth for the ultra-wealthy. The wealthy have

options and safety nets that the poor/working don’t

o Do the affects of social class outweigh those of individuality?

▪ The odds of moving into a different class than your parents are

very slim, especially compared to the past

o Equal opportunity vs. equal results

o Is someone of a lower SES’s drive effected, does it set them back

significantly knowing they are starting behind others; the sociology of

resilience?

▪ “the closer you are to the front of the room, the closer you are to

making it in, being able to sit In the front is the concept of

privilege”

o Inherit social differences that come with class, how did these

differences get studied in the first place?

▪ They are taught

o Can we not still obtain cultural capital over time

▪ You can, you just need capital to get into those spaces in the first

place

- Lecture

o Social capital= who you know

▪ Mediates access to educational/occupational/economic opportunity

▪ Available through relationships with others

▪ Unevenly distributed

▪ Example: learning about an internship through a family member that

works at a certain place

▪ Think of it as inside knowledge/networking

▪ There is a blurry line between one’s own merit and one’s social capital

o Inherited Capital and Meritocracy

▪ Meritocracy diminishes the importance of social class

• Where you start has a almost direct correlation to where you

end up

• Much of the upper-middle class inherited their own wealth by

the previous generation, class mobility to that top 5-20% is

sticky, and the poorer people have slightly more mobility

▪ Inherited capital increases importance of social class

• The more wealthy have more access/knowledge to opportunity

and they “hoard” it all in a sense that they take all of the

opportunity for themselves

• The likelihood of being born in 1940 and making more than

their parents was almost guaranteed, but by the 1980’s it

dwindled to around a 50/50 chance

o Class mobility is lower in the US than it is anywhere else

in the world, is amidst rising inequality

o Most economic gains going to the top 10-20%

▪ Wealth and Poverty are interwoven within one another

▪ Private opulence and Public Squalor

• Shifting from Meritocracy to privilege

• Devaluation of the public in favor of exclusive and private

o Lack of public spaces/ the rise of gated communities

• Proposition 13:

o Affected tax cuts for properties which ended up

slashing the educational funding, both higher education

and k-12 education (especially in California)

• Post Civil Rights Backlash/ Class intrest (late 70s-80s)

o Think about the effects of the post-civil rights on the

public pools of the time, some had the pools closed,

and some took to more violent takes

o Private/charter schools existed to do this as well

o The public became devalued and disinvested

• Zoning Laws and NIMBY

o There is manipulation of housing rules that are directly

discriminatory towards poor people

o Residential land (75%) is legally constricted to only

single-family homes

o NIMBY: Not My Backyard (Opposed to things being near

them)

• Opportunity Hoarding

o “it cannot both be true that excluding poor people from

high-opportunity communities enriches the lives of the

people inside the wall while degrading the lives of

people outside of it”

o “tearing down the wall and welcoming the poor into

those communities will come at not cost to the current

residents”

o White people were tasked to give up prejudice, but they

have yet to relinquish their privilege

o Everyone wants different outcomes but they do not

want for things to change.

• PERSONAL QUESTION

o If the rich ever decided to go against their “hoardish”

nature, to ever decide to give back, how long would it

take for their wealth distribution to balance out the

economy/ how much of their wealth would they have to

forsake?

- DAY SIX(Seven)

o Poverty first then Race as a social construct (Questions)

▪ (INSERT NOTES FROM OTTER)

▪ HOLY SHIT HE FEATURED MY QUESTION

• The key is taxing the uber rich, they would be unaffected

▪ This country exist in such a violent state of poverty despite the

richness as a government

▪ There should be a push and community incentive to go against the

negative push against public housing (to spark meaningful difference)

▪ The SAT originally was meant to match grades, and it never did

▪ The “impossibility” of a society existing in equality

▪ Side note on Vulnerability and Precarity

• How vulnerable are you to things happening to you

• You are like uber broke

o RACISM

▪ Jim Crow and the Construction of Race

• What happens in the past shapes what happens in the future

▪ The social order created the racial category, not the other way around

• Only after black people were designated as slaves were they

deemed black

• Skin color is a spectrum (there is no scientific base to draw

categories) the binary was created because of the social

systems

o Brazil is not as Binary in their racial system as the US

(think South Africa)

o It’s greatest effect is on citizenship, which changes

overtime (like race)

• “All men are created equal” from the man who holds over 200

people as slaves and as “intrinsically different” to legitimate

the system of inequality

• With the destruction of this system, the history is told through

a muddled lens

o They forgot about “Self-emancipation”, black people ran

into war-zones to escape slavery and seize freedom by

running into what may have been death

• Reconstruction and Jim crow

o Black people being in the majority had made a

significant impact on office, but they were all killed/ran

out of office because the troops that were essentially

protecting them from the confederates

o “Birth of a Nation” really racist movie that tries to

rewrite history

o Day Eight: Wealth, Racism, and Privilege

▪ “What does the racism of the past have to do with today?”

• Cultural media of that day went along with the ideal of “Black

people bring chaos and disorder and the KKK were essentially

hero’s” (The Lost Cause Myth) and these things were not that

long ago

• What tends to change the systems of racism is that the system

goes away, the key to racism is the legitimizing of inequality

• Calling racial categories biological makes it insanely difficult to

not justify racism

• “people don’t like to see the wrongs in their own ideals”

• Something can be not biologically real, but socially real

• Radical movements vs Reactionary movements, removal vs

revival

o Constant back and forth between social change and

social norms

• Racism persist through social class and wealth

o In every period, recession or no, Black people are

consistently negatively effected by unemployment

o They suffer the most from wealth Gap and the poverty

rate (poverty rate is second behind Alaskan)

o Racial wealth gap is the starkest and most important

racial disparity

▪ Persistent racial disparities in income, poverty,

home ownership, employment, etc.

o Discrimination is an individual act

o Sometimes systemic racism is mistaken for

discrimination (correlation vs causation)

o Controlling for something: holding something constant

o WE USE THE MEDIAN OVER THE MEAN (Means can

obscure data greatly)

• Where wealth in America comes from

o Starts building between 1946-1964

o Baby Boomers have collected a 9 trillion bounty from

their parents

▪ Black boomers inherited 13 cents for every dollar

white boomer inherited (for comparison)

o Suburbia is created by the FHA

▪ Banks were stingy on loans

▪ Government: fixed low rates

▪ Redlining/ Racially homogenous

neighborhoods (They only gave loans to

private/homogenous neighborhoods)

▪ Black people were stuck into renting

▪ Wide gap in home ownership between races,

under 50% of black people own a home

▪ The greatest acquiescence of wealth, is money

bequeathed by death

- DAY NINE

o Questions

▪ “Are people forever stuck (economically) if their parent’s aren’t

wealthy?” NO, but the odds are starkly different

▪ “If a family has never owned a home before what are the chances

that they will ever be able to own a home?” Slim, declined over the

years but not exactly zero

▪ “Through years and recessions, black and white wealth rise and

fall but the gap persists , what can be done to close it?”

▪ “Some steps we can take as a society to lessen the gap in wealth

disparities between races/ how long would it take to bridge the

gap?”

▪ “Why haven’t we put more efforts into getting rid of the racial

wealth gap?” It is dependent on the public push for it

o Lecture

▪ The wealth gap closing will not equalize on it’s own

▪ The difference between paying 2k a month in rent vs paying off 2k a

month for a mortgage, what wealth is being built with either option?

• Add on the amount of wealth gained or lost considering

whatever loans a person may or may not have out

• Wealth builds on itself, people who “make” the same amount

of money do not possess the same amount of wealth due to

how wealthy their parents are/were

▪ Transformative Assets: the capacity of unearned, inherited wealth to

lift a family economically/socially beyond where their own

achievements, jobs, and earnings would place them

• Contradiction between equal opportunity and inherited wealth

(inheritance vs meritocracy; both cannot peacefully coexist as

ideals)

• Economic policies (to alleviate strain)

o College Cost (could be free)

o Education inequality (could be drawn by redistributing

district boarders)

o Public services

o Policies that increase or decrease the importance of

family wealth

▪ (and the role of the racial wealth gap)

▪ Privilege makes your hard work have a greater payoff than others

▪ College educations are designed to be transferred across different

fields

▪ Only 27-48% of grads end up in a job related to their major (people

also change careers/jobs with the changing economy)

• College is not Job Training

▪ Liberal arts education is meant to build specific skills/ knowledge with

broad applications

▪ Core Curriculum are meant to deliver a broad education

▪ Sociology tends to move beyond simplistic social questions/answers

• Understanding how different policies and social dynamics

work in the context of a given society

▪ Sociology vs Self-Help

• Work becomes an increasingly important part of our sense

of self, lives, and identities, it is necessary to encourage

students to pursue a career that they are passionate about

o World of work is not a series of fixed options but a

potential site of democracy

o Workplace democracy and freedom

▪ Electing your bosses

▪ Being able to go on strike

▪ Having a collective agreement on how policies

should be, and an equal political voice

Recitation Notes

• Notes on Article: Doctors Give Black Women Unneeded C-Sections to Fill Operating

Rooms

o Healthy Black Women with low risk factors were far likely to get C-sections

than white women with similar medical histories

o Black women are 20% more likely to have a C-section preformed

▪ Suggesting racial bias paired with financial incentives played a role in

decision making

▪ Doctors may rush to perform worried about racial disparities in

childbirth outcomes

▪ Black women [may feel less empowered to push back against csection suggestion when labor is unprogressive

• When resisted, less likely to be taken seriously

▪ Medical records are not all-inclusive, can miss things that a Doctor

used to make medical decisions

▪ Insurance companies pay more for a C-section than they do vaginal

births

▪ Doctors may be misdiagnosing black women with fetal distress during

labor (which leads to C sections)

• The Three forms of capital (MIDTERM IMPORTANCE)

o Economic: the things you OWN (money and assets)

o Social Capital: Connections/Affiliations (WHO you know)

o Cultural Capital: Knowledge of NORMS, values, beliefs, and practices (HOW

you act in practice/ processes in certain settings)

• Where do we learn what gender is “supposed” to look like

o Family:

▪ The different dynamics that you see in your family

▪ (Some) observing other family members

▪ Some learn the ideas of gender roles being different than others

depending on the dynamic of the family

▪ Parents “facilitate” their child’s gender identity

• Gender Fragments: (leading into support or pushback)

• Gender Problem: (Can lead to counselor or teacher talk,

this discussion is further along then familial talk)

o Media:

▪ Color association

o Cultural/Global Norms

▪ In Brazil(or globally) gender is a spectrum because there exists

multiple perspectives around gender

• This typology of Femininity

o Tradwife

o Girlboss

o Lean-In Feminism

o Transitional Feminist Movement