My days
at Pitt are waning; my college career is almost at its end. In my last days at
this school, there are many things that I could reflect upon. I could consider
my friends and how they influenced me on a yearly basis, I could talk about my living
situations and how they could have been better or worse, I could talk about the
troubles that I’ve avoided and the classes that I’ve hated or enjoyed. I could
reflect on everything that I liked or disliked about my school, but, alas, this
is a class concerning problems taking place in the social sphere, and as such,
the duty of this blog is to make my best attempt to talk about the details
concerning the sociological understanding of the world around me.
This post is dedicated to this
semester- the things I enjoyed about the class, the books that I either
understood or pretended to, and the discussions that we had in class in which I
either participated in or listened to intently.
My
expectations going into this class were admittedly low, not because of the
topics that were to be covered or the larger size of the class in comparison to
what I’ve become accustomed to over the past two years, but because of my
standing as a business major. Before this class, my association with anything sociology-related
was at a minimum, or so I thought- I knew of the name, and I knew people
majored in it, but I did not understand what it meant.
Now
that my learning for the class has reached its apex, I can say, matter of factly, that this class
exceeded my expectation in every way. Though it got off to a rough start- I can’t
say that I enjoyed the writing in The New
Jim Crow, though the topic was interesting to me- I think I really began to
appreciate the class as a whole when we began our discussion of Dorm Room Dealers. This was something that
I lived through- things that I had seen as a Freshman and Sophomore but never
spoken of. Nobody wants to be a “nark”, so having an open forum through which I
could listen and speak about the things that had been marinating within my mind
for two years about drugs and college was a fantastic break from the norm.
When my
group presented on the first part of The
Working Poor, I realized that there was more behind wage disparity than
what the media provides us with. Earned Income Tax Credit? What was that? And
the fact that there were loansharks that made certain that the poor stayed poor
through awful lending practices, and the H&R Block fees for filling out
papers… all of it was new to me, not because I had not heard about it, but
because it was something that just spoken of and not discussed in everyday
life.
The two
books that I was able to put the most time into were The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Dude, You’re a Fag. I was interested in both of these books for a
multitude of reasons, mostly because the topics that they research underscore
almost everything happening in our lives whether we realize it or not.
Dude, You’re a Fag’s
discussion of masculinity hit me harder than any topic we conversed about all
semester. I hear my little brother speak
using “fag discourse” on a daily basis- I’ll say something and he’ll call me a “fag”
for sounding stupid, and although I correct him, I didn’t realize that the
issue was as prevalent as it is. The information contained in this book could
change the world if it was required reading for schools, jobs, government,
anything really- the analysis woke something up inside of me that wants to
fight for gender equality that, although it was festering before, is now something
that I truly believe in.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was
interesting to me because of my humanity. I like to think of myself as a
compassionate person on an individual level, but where is the line drawn
between love for a person and love for an entire population? If I had the
option to save someone I love at the risk of the rest of the world, or a chance
to save the rest of the world from future diseases, what would I do? Although
Henrietta’s life was already speeding toward its conclusion, the doctors took
her cells and, eventually, people began making money off of her sickness.
Should her family have been compensated? Absolutely. But how can we determine
what belongs to who when it comes from someone’s body? What constitutes as permission
to use someone’s health or lack of it to do scientific research? Some of the
questions that this book made me begin thinking of are not yet resolved in my
head, and I don’t know that they will be, but I’m confident that the ideas that
were presented to me are going to stick with me for the remainder of my life.
And that’s
just it- this class, having nothing to do with my major or anything that I
thought I would do in the future- has changed the way I think. It makes me want
to do research on things that I don’t understand, it makes me want to figure
out my opinion about things more so than I already have, and it makes me want
to explore the possibilities of what is right and wrong. It’s ignited a fire
inside, and being able to take that fire into the real world is going to be a
great challenge indeed.
