SumBlog 12

To start this off if you haven’t seen the “Going Native” episode of South Park, I recommend it. I say that because the expression (that’s also the title of the episode) is used as a descriptive term when talking about Dorothy Smith’s notion of Standpoint Approach. This idea came about from her recognition that if a society was to be studied it had to be from within, yet not so far within that you become a part of it, i.e. ‘going native’. This theory came as a result of another notion she termed “Bifurcated Consciousness” that she experienced first-hand from living life as a woman in a primarily male dominated world. To pull a quote from the reading; “As it is now, these strategies separate a sociologically constructed world from that of direct experience.” (p.295) In terms of a food chain, white men are at the top. They are the most privileged and experience the least amount of discrimination, mainly because they are the ones who have had the largest say in establishing societies. All others that belong to any other group are outside of this privilege and are apt to different experiences and situations. With the large majority of social theorists and professors being white males, Dorothy’s critique was of their lack of qualification to study and the validity of their works.  Returning to the standpoint approach, she suggested that they take a more inside means of studying the society that they have segregated. There are a lot more divisions than the two that Dorothy talks about simply between the men and the women. These divisions can stretch to across all characteristics of people because the more elemental differences between people, the more circumstantial differences as well. It’s an idea ahead of her time and because of the differences she herself recognized, her ideas weren’t more recognized.

Dave Chappelle has some of my all time favorite skits and stand ups, he exaggerates the realities of racial and gender differences (as he does here) but they all have root in societal truths. This bit makes fun of how whites are more or less 'above the law' than blacks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbj7vx1Acps