Youth Up in Arms

As both the “Youth in Revolt” introduction as well as the “Reading the Riots” articles showed us, no society regardless of how civilized it believes it is, is impervious to mass rioting and rebellion. The riots that took place in 2011 in England were just the tip of the iceberg. Already we have seen several other occupy movements and riots occur all over both Europe as well as some westernized countries in the middle east. Before this recent wave of revolts that spread across the world, the commonly held attitude about these revolts was that they were purely vandalism and anarchy on the part of a depraved youth. But with all of whats going in Greece, Turkey, Brazil and other countries around the world, it has awaken the world to the reality that this is what happens when the “social dynamite” explodes, and that dire circumstances have made educated youth who would have rather joined the workforce into anarchists instead. In countries such as Greece, youth unemployment is at a staggering 50 percent.
These revolts are due in large part to the fact that governments around the world have been incredibly risky and reckless in handling their respective economies and have externalized the risks they’ve taken and placed them onto their youth and expected them to bite the bullet and take the loss. Instead though, the youth have risen up in arms and refused to take sit idly while their futures are “gambled” away by lousy public policies and expressed their disagreement in the form of rioting.

Blog Post 7: The Creation of a Permanent Underclass

Loic Wacquant discusses the era of the ghetto and how it was ultimately formed. He illustrates the role of higher society in creating and maintaining a system of permanent subordination. He states that blacks had entered the economy by contributing cheap labor, the only variable that whites could manipulate to make a profit, yet remained ostracized and marginalized, consigned to what was later referred to as the ghetto. Whites accepted integration in theory, but had not accepted it in reality, facilitating a mass onslaught of segregation. African-Americans were stigmatized, geographically confined, constrained both economically and socially, as well as institutionally encased.

Wacquant states, “The ghetto, in short, operates as an ethnoracial prison: it encages a dishonoured category and severely curtails the life chances of its members in support of the ‘monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities’ by the dominant status group dwelling on its outskirts.” The film titled “Precious” illustrates several of these concepts that define the ghetto and contribute to a permanent underclass of wrongfully stigmatized groups of people. The main character Precious is forced to adhere to the policies of the welfare system in order to obtain the bare minimum of assistance in a community that is lacking proper education and a severely lacking job market. She is socially and economically removed from any form of political participation, and as Wacquant states, “lower-class African-Americans now dwell, not in a society with prisons as their white compatriots do, but in the first genuine prison society in history.”

Blog Post #6: Dr. King the Deviant

Freedom of speech is the expression of free thought through a vocal medium. To do so without being susceptible to persecution is a natural right. My current ability to write this statement is an expression of the First amendment in and of itself. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. was a deviant to American society. Martin Luther King Jr. simply used the power of rhetoric. The act itself is not undesirable or devious. In that era and in some ways today, being of color is deviant within itself. The use of freedom of speech by a colored individual was deemed obscene and socially unacceptable. To white Americans, he was a radical and a menace. To many outside the United States, this wasn’t the case. This is an example of how deviance itself is universal but this particular act was considered deviant in one place but not another.

Blog Post #5: Medicalization

The topic of medicalization is one that is extremely important to me. As an aspiring physician, I hope to one day reduce the amount of individuals that suffer from diseases such as heart disease and diabetes, which are ironically preventable. My focus should be to prolong life and prevent disease from ever emerging at all. However, medicalization has led to a focus on treating diseases (many of which are preventable, as I mentioned). The shift from a style of “solo practice” to a more business, bureaucratic nature of medicine creates a demand for diseases to be treated and problems to be solved. As Conrad and Schneider mention, more and more human conditions are being medicalized as health care becomes more about chasing capital. Above is a trailer of the documentary “Food Matters” which, aside from placing emphasis on the need for nutrition advocacy, delves into the need for medicine to be less profit and politically driven.

Blog Post 4: Removing the Stigma

The stigma associated with mental illness is quite crippling. Much of the current debate regarding the causes of mental illness are genetic or environmentally based factors. Those who believe that mental illness is genetic, tend to distance themselves further from the individual and tend to place a severe stigma on not only the individual but the family from which they come. Those who believe that the individual has developed a mental illness based on environmental or social factors still place a stigma on those individuals, considering them to be weak or questioning how they were raised. As Goffman states, this stigma allows society to create a means of labeling and categorizing, and mentally classifies them as undesirable. These people are almost inevitably rejected by a society that has been conditioned to the stigma that is placed on individuals with differences or perhaps mental illness, discrediting legions of people who could potentially be helped if they were considered more valuable as a person.

Blog Post 3: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The film titled “Crash” perfectly illustrates the concept of deviance as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The two African-American males discuss how the LAPD perceive them to be deviant, based on the simple fact that they are black males walking around a wealthy and predominately white neighborhood. In this environment, being black is considered deviant. The two men eventually come to terms with how others view them and assume the characteristics of the deviant figures others claim they are. They rationalize that if others think this way already, why not engage in deviant behavior. As Howard S. Becker states that due to being excluded from participation in most other conventional groups, or do to the “treatment” which may itself produce increasing deviance, individuals or legions of people for that matter, are more inclined to engage in deviant behavior because they are already preconceived to do so.

Race and Stigma Management

Amir Marvasti’s article, “Being Middle Eastern American: Identity Negotiation in the Context of the War on Terror,” does a great job in encompassing the various aspects of stigma management. I do feel that although Middle Eastern Americans receive the greatest amount of racism in America, especially after 9/11, all races endure some sort of discrimination from another race at one point in their life. Personally, as a Guyanese-American, I have experienced much racism throughout my life. For example, just a few days ago I was getting frozen yogurt with my cousins in a predominantly Caucasian area. From the moment we entered the store we were stared at as if we were aliens. In this situation, and in most that I have been in, I tend to result to defense cowering. I don’t necessarily agree with this term for the fact that it makes those who use it to cope seem like cowards, but the reason why I use this strategy is because I am 5’2” and 90 lbs. That being said, I don’t think it is such a good idea for me to try to address a situation if I have no way of defending myself if it gets out of hand. Basically my point in bringing up this situation is that every race gets targeted. It’s not right, but it happens. With the society we live in, we are all classified into a particular group and rated amongst others. Because of this, we feel the need to put others down to make ourselves seem better that we are rated by the mass.

As a side note: There is a Bollywood movie that I think goes great with the theme presented in Marvasti’s article. The movies name is “My Name is Khan” and it depicts the struggles Middle Eastern Americans faced after 9/11. I’ve attached a trailer of the movie with English subtitles if anyone’s interested.

Blog Post #2: Gangs & Deviance

While reading “‘Social Junk’ vs ‘Social Dynamite'”, I could not help but to think about gangs. In the United States, gangs arose out of a need, namely a need to protect the interests and rights of those that were marginalized. During that period, those individuals were African-Americans and they were protecting themselves from the government (specifically the police). In the article, the author mentions the Black Panthers and their role. The Black Panther party, a socialist group established in the late 1960s, are indeed the epitome of social dynamite; they served as the precursor for today’s gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods. Although gangs like the Crips and the Bloods are currently considered equivalent to domestic terrorists, they are very much the products social strain. The documentary “Crips and Bloods: Made in America” delves into and dissects this issue. The title itself suggests that gangs were born here and that they are in a sense, America’s fault. As Robert Merton suggests in his strain theory and his modes of adaptation to anomie, that individuals who experience a disconnect between socially prescribed goals and the means to achieving them feel a sense of alienation and often deviate from the norm to compensate for that. This is exactly what happened and continues to happen in the US and is why gangs were indeed born. Gangs today like the Panthers back in the 1960s, are still just protecting their interests.

Blog post #2: Social Dynamite and the Economy

In the past 3 years, we have seen an enormous increase of social movements around the world form in order to protest either government measures or business decisions which have lead to the decrease in the quality of life for large quantities of populations. Many of these movements label themselves as being “occupy” movements, as they protest by occupying either government buildings or financial centers. In America there have been a number of these movements, starting with the “occupy wall street” movement and continuing most recently to the “occupy Monsanto”. But this phenomena of impoverished populations protesting en masse is now occurring around the world. The video above portrays Greece, a capitalist country which has been in steep recession for several years and is now experiencing high rates of youth unemployment as well as several austerity measures enacted by the government. Youth unemployment seems to be a large theme in several of the occupy movements that are occurring around the world.
Upon reading Christian Parenti’s analysis of “Social junk vs. Social dynamite”, I came across many of the characteristics of the “Occupy” movements in his explanation of the social dynamite class. He describes social dynamite as, “the impoverished low-wage working class and unemployed youth who have fallen bellow the statistical radar, but whose spirits are not broken and whose expectations for a decent life and social inclusion are dangerously alive and well.” These Movements view themselves as having been cheated by both their government and big business, but rather than passively accepting this fate, they insist on making their voices heard by those in power in the hopes that it will result in change.

changing deviant behavior- 1950’s/ Social Control

Social control ” attempts by society to regulate people’s thoughts and behavior.” (p172) Society has been controlling the way we are supposed to act, think and behave. Society is what shapes our social norms and tells us what is deviant behavior and what is not. This brings us to the topic of the social foundations of deviance in chapter 7. There are 3 distinct social foundations of deviance:
1. deviance varies according to cultural norms
2.people become deviant as others define them that way
3.both norms and the way people define rule breaking involve social power.
All of these play a huge role on how we behave on a day to day basis.
This video is an educational video from the 1950’s for teenage girls and there deviant behavior. It portrays a teenage girl doing things that is socially unacceptable and is taught that these are wrong. She is portrayed as a deviant girl . The culture norm for a teenage girl in the 1950’s and still in present day is to act accordingly; to listen to her parents and teachers, to do what her culture tells her to do and what society expects from her. This is how many, if not all of us are shaped from young, because society tells us and shows us what is the norm. This is how we distinguish what is a deviant behavior and what is not.