Sum 7

               W.E. B. Du Bois ideas of the veil and double consciousness or twoness can be represented by just about everyone in one way or another I’m sure. Everyone would have their own circumstances and conditions pertaining to their situation. Are there ever any situations where there’s a positive veil? I was thinking earlier of an attractive girl interviewing and receiving a job that she’s under qualified for, where would that be in relation to this concept? Then I got to thinking about how the military jury (in the video we watched for class) got to be there, which was probably an easy journey if they had connections through the family or just an advantage because they’re of a middle or higher class and their white.  So I’ll take that as an answer to my question.

                To make sure I have this stuff straight, I understand the veil as the characteristics of a person that most often negatively, but can sometimes positively, affect them. I believe the double consciousness to be the recognition of the characteristics that give you your veil. Du Bois, being a black man with an English education was able to see, very clearly, the differences in how he was treated in his environment compared to the white men around him and the privileges that weren’t offered to him.

                He had good ideas and concepts that I bet helped other people realize that they were in a similar situation and gave them motivation and the support to back their argument up. The Tuskegee Airmen could’ve even been some of the few that he’s helped lay foundations for.

Sum Blog 6

               Never before have I considered the concept of a sociologist making observations on their studies from the outside until reading Dorothy Smith’s piece. She explains it best, here; ‘Even to be a stranger is to enter a world constituted from within as strange. The strangeness itself is the mode in which it is experienced.’ At the time I found this idea very strange in itself because I couldn’t relate to her understanding and claim of how people were studying societies from outside them when at the same time, they were living as a part of them. Reading along further I could identify more with what she was saying because she focuses on the very specific and individual intricacies of society. She uses the example of passing a family of Indians while riding the train as she sees them through the window and how it was all relative to her perspective from her life’s experiences up to that point. Being that she hasn’t lived a lifestyle similar to theirs, she doesn’t believe that it is possible for her to fully understand their society.

                I especially loved her idea of educators in our society teaching girls as they grew up how they would be at a disadvantage and why, by our construction of society as they were growing up. What a world that would be. Maybe I’m putting words in her mouth but she put it as; ‘A sociology for women would offer a knowledge of the social organization and determinations of the properties and events of our directly experienced world.’ And that’s how I took it.

                Sociologists have been suggested to change how they study. To not ‘impose a conceptual framework that extracts from [other societal modes] what fits with ours’, to live amongst them and develop and understanding from the inside out rather than the outside in. This is not the ultimate solution though, because these interactions are only yet the product of our past societal constructions. Dorothy explains how women’s experiences allow them the ability to see the concern of how modern sociologist’s claim they are about the world when they display an ambiguous understanding of women’s experiences. 

Sum Blog 5

                A full night of drinking in a dirty city, filling your lungs with smoke and smog, disoriented, swimming in soiled sheets with someone who’ll give you the reason for your next prescription, then waking up and being flown away to a utopian valley set a top a mountain summit with nothing more on your mind than the warm breeze coming across the lake as you walk along the soft shore.  Harriet Martineau’s reading was revitalizing. Maybe not quite as extensive as that but I definitely enjoyed that very much.

                The fact that such wonderfully fresh ideas were ignored soon after she died, even with the great impression she made was a sure sign of the time, what a bummer. She had it all figured out, happiness, that’s all. If everybody’s happy what could possibly be the matter? Eliminate all created inequalities and be kind. Rationally, it’s a far out idea but it’s the blueprint to societal perfection. Her four anomalies of slavery, unequal status of women, pursuit of wealth, and fear of public opinion are wonderful. Everybody should be able to at least have an understanding for how these are “misalignments of societal morals and manners”. For me, as I’m sure for you, one sticks out more than the other. The most prominent for me is fear of public opinion. Growing up I was always concerned about others perceptions, it dictated my mannerisms, values, opinions, everything. It sucked, and in short I got sick of it and snapped. It wasn’t overnight but roughly the course of a year or two I had spun all the way around, and let me tell you what a breath of fresh air that was. I think if everyone could honestly be unapologetically themselves it would make the world a marvelous place (unless you’re a murderer or a rapist or some kind of screw up).

               Another thing I loved was how she said “the sociologist must try to develop a sympathetic understanding as a strategy for discovering the meanings of an activity for the actors.” Aristotle had said; “It’s the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” That’s the first thing I thought of after I finished reading her sentence. I love talking to people that understand (or at least try to) what you’re saying before they blurt something back. I feel like I recognized, after reading Martineau’s paper, that a few of the previous sociologists had more or less of a “my way or the highway” type of attitude. Anyway, I like what she had to say a lot, my favorite so far. 

Sum Blog 4

Weber’s “Bureaucratic Machine” illustrates the consequences of bureaucracy, one of them being that it limits our human potential. This type of system requires high specialization of an individual’s duty in order to complete a task most efficiently. I hear this and think of horse blinds, you become assigned to one task only and you complete it to their standard, that’s it. They are reducing a person’s full potential. I think it comes back to the efficiency of the company or organization, if somebody leaves that job for whatever reason; they want to be able to fill it as fast as they can and don’t want to have anything uncovered.

Another thing with this is that everything becomes predictable. In a way it’s nice because there are fewer problematic surprises and the few that do come up generally have a simple solution. Though on the other hand it’s very slow to adapting change, and with the size of the business directly correlating to the time it takes to implement the change, it’s no surprise that it can become a large problem to move things around after a certain point, that certain point is a 12 ton snow ball with a boulder in the middle, zooming down a hill that only a massive catastrophic event can stop.

           There’s one other little thing that I couldn’t quite understand, how Weber said that bureaucratic organizations come into power on the basis of leveling economic and social differences. Isn’t it a system based on levels? It seems that both democratic and bureaucratic systems have founding rules that contradict a majority of what they are today.