How can a sociological perspective help us understand the recent events in Charlottesville? In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explores how a symbolic interactionist perspective can be useful for understanding the meaning making of symbols and words.
When I was a college freshman, I enrolled in introduction to sociology. In our sociology textbook, there was a pictures of this:
I was absolutely struck by this image. I had never seen a photograph of Americans giving the Nazi salute. Note, that I called it the Nazi salute. In my mind, and for most living Americans it is the Nazi salute because that is the imagery we are familiar with and we have less familiarity with the Bellamy salute. Upon closer examination, (i.e., a Wikipedia search) I learned that the Bellamy salute and the Nazi salute are not precisely the same. Regardless, they are close enough that in 1942, the Bellamy salute was replaced with the hand over the heart gesture Americans now use when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The meaning of the Bellamy salute changed because of the Nazi use of a similarly styled salute.
Symbols & Meaning Making
The meaning of other symbols also changes and the very same symbol may hold different meaning for different groups. Let’s consider the Confederate flag. I grew up in the Midwest and I don’t remember folks in my hometown flying the Confederate flag or having any particular opinion on the flag. My only memory of the flag prior to attending college was a co-worker who chose to have the Confederate flag engraved on her class ring. She thought it was pretty. I thought it was a bit strange to put a flag of the Confederacy on a class ring, but she was originally from the South. As older teenagers we had different perspectives on the flag neither of which seemed politicized (to our knowledge, anyway). I suspect the Confederate flag also reminded her of home and helped remind her that she was Southern even if living in the Midwest. I suspect she could be a strong proponent of the “Heritage, not hate” meaning of the flag and other symbols of the Confederacy. Or she could be a strong proponent of the racist uses of Confederate symbols….
Evictions have become a common occurrence in the past 10 years. In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath discusses Matthew Desmond’s book about evictions and her own experience with informal eviction.
I have never been evicted. Scratch that. I have never been formally evicted. I have been informally evicted.
In 2005, I lived in an apartment building one block from Piedmont Park in Atlanta. The building was old. There was a one-inch gap between the top and bottom windowpane in the bathroom–which I discovered during the winter. The ventilation was terrible–which I discovered when I found mold growing in my bedroom closet (and had to throw out a lot of clothing and shoes–some which were too far gone to clean). But it was near the park and all the park had to offer, so there were trade-offs to living here. I lived there for only a few months before our building was sold. The new landlords wanted to convert the building into condos. They needed the current tenants out so that they could do this. They paid me $1,000 to move (enough to cover my moving expenses). I did not consider this an eviction until I read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in The American City, by sociologist and wunderkind, Matthew Desmond (MacArthur Fellow, Pulitzer Prize, New York Times 10 Best Books of 2016). I also did not consider my next move an eviction when my rent was raised by $50 a month. Two forced moves in a row.
My family and I decided it was time to buy a home. Unfortunately, we bought during the housing crash–prices were still declining, but we had no idea how much more they would decline when we needed to move again (our choice). We sold for less than we paid for the house. We rented for awhile. Then we bought again. Then we moved again (read more about that here and here). Again we sold for less than we paid for our house. In both cases, we were just grateful for an offer…any offer.
The Extent of Evictions
In Evicted, Desmond reports the findings from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS) that he conducted. He found that:
- In Milwaukee, one in eight renters were either formally or informally evicted within the previous two years (p. 330). These evictions were categorized as (p. 330-1):
- Informal evictions: 48%
- Formal evictions: 24%
- Landlord foreclosures: 23%
- Building condemnation: 5%
Rural voters have recently come to dominate the news in the quest to determine who is to responsible for the election of Donald Trump. In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath discusses her own experience of rurality and the misidentification of social problems.
I grew up in a rural downstate Illinois town. I was always going to go to college, as I describe here. My high school guidance counselor was less supportive than my parents. He gave me this advice when I told him my after high school plans:
“Expect your grades to be one to two grades lower than they are now. And, do you realize how far away that college is?” (Yes, I did. I had visited it. The campus was an “onerous” 2.5 hour drive.)
In short, I was encouraged by my guidance counselor to stay closer to home and lower my expectations.
Instead of taking his advice to heart, I did what I planned to do (the trendy descriptor for this would be that I had grit). I moved away to a college town. When folks in my hometown learned of my black roommate from Chicago, they gave me well intended sympathy that was motivated by their racism and fear of all things from Chicago. I learned what to share with my friends and acquaintances from my small town to avoid their racially motivated fears and sympathies.
For graduate school I moved to a southern city. Here I experienced disregard for rurality from my classmates. In one of my first sociology classes, we read research from one of our faculty that studied a rural area and a classmate asked him “why study rural areas because nobody lives there”? I let it slide. This was my first semester and I didn’t want my peers to think less of me. In another class, a classmate disparaged the Amazon reviewers for her book as uneducated and backwoods on account that they were not enthusiastic about her book. When we were assigned a chapter to read from Morel Tales, I was the first student who ever shared with my professor that I had actually been mushroom hunting. I learned to ignore the slights and selectively disclose my own rurality. But here’s the thing, I was never fearful because of my rurality. No one ever threatened me because of it. No one ever intimidated me because of it. No one ever suggested that I should go back where I came from. Perhaps my experience would have been more difficult had I moved to a city outside of the south. In the south, my rural y’alls could be passed off as southern and not necessarily rural….
Why are some people crying while others are joyful over the 2016 presidential election? Wondering how to understand the range of reactions to this election? In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explores how using your sociological imagination can help you understand the responses to the results.
Did you vote in the 2016 US Presidential election? I did. Did you stay up late to watch the results? I did not. I went to bed not knowing which candidate had won. And then I woke up the next morning and checked the results. I will not describe my personal reaction, but instead point out the range of reactions Americans had (and are still having) to the results. Some people were overcome with grief. Others were elated. Still others defensive, confused, or unsure. Some folks felt validated and others became (more) fearful for their personal safety and that of their loved ones. And some continued not to care at all.
Why all of these different responses? Are we really all so different? Did the presidential election drive a greater wedge between Americans? Perhaps our reactions to a presidential election are not all that new (2012, 2004) but instead our differences are just amplified due to social media and a 24-hour news cycle littered with pundits and talking heads instead of trained journalists. Those are questions for another day.
Regardless, you might be a bit perplexed by how people are responding to the results (whether they are insulting one another on social media or protesting in the streets). It is challenging to understand why people vote differently from ourselves and why they might respond to the results differently, too. Sociology helps me figure all of this out–especially when I use the sociological imagination….
Automation, or the use of computers, robots, and machines, is efficient and presumably saves us time and mental energy. But automation still requires human involvement. In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath discusses some of the ways she experiences automation and how human involvement is still needed to make automation work, which begs the question as to whether automation really does replace human workers.
I missed a mortgage payment. I found out 21 days after the payment should have posted. This should not have happened. I have my mortgage payment process completely automated — or so I thought. I have a dedicated checking account that I use only to make my mortgage payment. I have a portion of my paycheck set-up to directly deposit money during each pay period into that account. Once set up, I should not have to do anything to make it work.
Unbeknownst to me, however, my bank resets automated payments every 12 months. I learned this when I received a letter in the mail notifying me of my missed payment. As soon as I opened the letter, I logged into my bank account and made the payment. I then called the bank to ask them to waive the late fee (which they did). I fixed the automatic payments so that they would begin occurring again. Then, I set up a reminder in Google Calendar one month prior to the automated payment expiration so that I can reset the automated payments before they are stopped in 2017.
If you were counting along at home, it took me four steps to fix the problem that saved me from logging into my account 12 times a year to make my monthly payment. So much for saving time by automating my mortgage payments. Further, several steps were involved to set-up this automation in the first place. First, I had to calculate my 12-monthly mortgage payments over 10 months of paychecks (I get paid August-May, like many faculty). Then, I had to go into my payroll system, which is online, and set up my direct deposit with the amount that I wanted directed into that bank account.
A couple of years ago, my family was driving in the mountains outside of Portland, Oregon. We had GPS and our cell phones for directions. At one point, however, the road our GPS instructed us to turn on was clearly a logging road. And our cell phones were now out of range, too. We opted to turn around and go back the way we came where we knew where we were at and when we last knew we had cell phone coverage. Using a GPS simply requires you to input your destination. Your directions, then, can be read out loud to you. You do not need to be able to read a map or even have paper map in your car (we now keep a US-Mexico-Canada Rand McNally Road Atlas in our car). In this case, if we trusted the automation system, we could have gotten seriously lost. Using this system also required us to pay attention to our route in case our GPS failed us (which it did)….
When a sociologist visits an art museum, what do they see? In this instance, Stephanie Medley-Rath connects the racial composition of the place to the artwork on display and the photography behavior of the patrons. In particular, what are the norms of selfie-taking?
I recently visited the Art Institute of Chicago. I went with the purpose of seeing the Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibit. While the Van Gogh exhibit was interesting and very crowded (too crowded to be enjoyable IMO), I also explored some of the other highlights of the museum. I did not tour the whole museum due to limitations on time and the stamina of the seven-year-old with me. My observations are limited to only those exhibits I saw on a Saturday afternoon Easter weekend of 2016.
One thing that immediately struck me at the art institute was how race mattered in the museum space. Among the visitors, I saw a sea of mostly white faces and bodies. Among the museum protection staff (i.e., security officers), I saw nearly all black faces and bodies. The museum protection staff are to remain mostly invisible. They are there to protect the art. They are quick to gently remind visitors to not use flash photography or stand too close to the art. Otherwise, they stand in place and do not interact with the patrons. The racial composition of those working in the museum and those visiting the museum was similar to my observations at a St. Louis Cardinal’s game in 2012. In other words, it is hardly noteworthy because the racial difference between those who are serving and those being served is normative in cities that are highly racially segregated like St. Louis and Chicago (which is the third most segregated city in the nation)….
In the Disney movie Frozen, were Elsa’s parents right to hide her ability to freeze the world? Were their concerns that she would be stigmatized correct? In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explores the real-world risk involved with disclosing stigmatizing conditions.
I want to focus on a portion of the song, however, and how it relates to the sociological concept of stigma. In case you are unfamiliar with the song, here is the verse that lends itself to a focus on stigma:
“Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know
Well, now they know!”
For Elsa, her secret was that she could freeze everything. An accident where her powers accidentally hurt her sister Anna, led her parents to keep her secret powers concealed from everyone, including her sister. Once her secret became known, she went into exile. The disclosure of her condition was enough of a reason for others to attempt to kill her in an effort to take her kingdom from her.
Elsa’s ability to freeze things was a stigmatizing condition (and also a potential source of power). She was taught to hide her condition. Her’s was a condition that could be kept hidden and controlled as long as she wore her gloves. She always wore her gloves except she had to remove them during her coronation. The lack of gloves made it very difficult for her to keep her condition hidden. She was forced to disclose her ability in a very public way and with immediate risk to her life and threat to her kingdom. She had reason to keep her secret hidden….
Can President Obama appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court if it is last year in office? In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explains that Obama does have authority, specifically, legal-rational authority to make this appointment.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died February 13, 2016. Republicans began arguing that President Obama should not appoint a new Supreme Court justice because it is his last year in office. They argue that the appointment decision should go to the next president. This would mean that the vacancy would be open for over a year. Their argument is that though the current president has the authority to appoint the next Supreme Court justice, there is a long-standing tradition that the president does not make such an appointment during his (and it has always been a him) last year in office. Republicans are making an appeal to alleged traditionto make their case–a tradition that does not hold up under scrutiny. This whole debate over whether President Obama should nominate the next Supreme Court justice when he has the authority to do so, provides us with a nice illustration of the possible types of authority an individual could hold.
Authority is the power exercised over others that is viewed as just or legitimate. This type of power is understood to be legitimate by those exercising the power and having the power exercised over them. The President of the United States has authority over the citizens of the United States. But where does a president’s authority come from? Is this authority complete? Can this authority be challenged? The sociologist Max Weber conceptualized three distinct types of authority: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. Which type or types of authority does a US president have?…
Vote for me! I promise to make America great! In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath considers how one might conceptualize and operationalize the notion of “great” using the 2016 US Presidential candidates’ campaign platforms.
Donald J. Trump’s campaign slogan is “make America great again!” But that brings up the question, how do you measure greatness? In his slogan, Trump is implying two things:
- America is no longer great, but once was.
- If elected president, then he will make America great again.
But what does he mean by “great”? Let’s start by considering his key campaign issues. According to his website, he has stated positions on five issues:
- U.S. China Trade Reform
- Veterans Administration Reforms
- Tax Reform
- Protecting Second Amendment Rights
- Immigration Reform
Why these issues? Are the alleged problems related to these five issues all that is preventing America from being “great again”? Why not other issues?
Others could make the case that America is still great or already great again. For example, unemployment rates in 2015, were back to the 2005 level of approximately 5 percent. The US high school dropout rate declined from 12 percent in 1990, to 11 percent in 2000, and then to 7 percent in 2013 according to the National Center for Education Statistics.1 The survival rate for childhood leukemia has improved dramatically since the 1950s (National Cancer Institute). Crime rates and teenaged pregnancy rates have declined, too. While none of these problems have been solved, progress has been made in a number of areas.
But wait, perhaps my glass really is half-empty. What about the 987 people killed by police in 2015? Or the declining share of Americans in the middle class? The size of the US middle class has declined to 50 percent of the US population from 61 percent in 1971 according to the latest PEW data. Or childhood poverty? Childhood poverty remains stable for blacks, but has declined for whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. One in five US children, however, lives at or below the poverty line, making the US at number two behind Romania with the highest level of child poverty in the Western world as reported by The Washington Post….
Family is a persistent social institution, but it does change. In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath discusses a few growing trends in family structure.
Family is a social institution— an organized patterns of groups and norms that meets some need in society. Family meets the needs of socializing children, for example. Family persists as a social institution but does change over time. Before you read the rest of this post, reflect for a moment on the ways in which you believe family has changed over time. Now, let’s consider a few ways in which families are changing.
Cohabitation refers to living together as though married, but without legal or religious sanctioning. Cohabiting has become more socially acceptable and is an increasingly common living arrangement. According to Manning and Stykes (2013:1), “[t]he percentage of women who have ever cohabited has almost doubled over the past 25 years.” Cohabitation is not necessarily replacing marriage, but is often a step before marriage. “[O]ver two-thirds (69%) of women who first married in the last decade cohabited prior to marriage” (Manning and Stykes 2013:2). So, if you have ever cohabitated, you are part of the statistical norm.
Remaining Single Longer
According to Pew Research Center, “[i]n 2012, one-in-five adults ages 25 and older (about 42 million people) had never been married. … In 1960, only about one-in-ten adults (9%) in that age range had never been married. Men are more likely than women to have never been married (23% vs. 17% in 2012)” (Wang and Parker 2014). Of course, part of the explanation for this trend is that Americans are waiting to get married, with some cohabiting first. Relatedly, the average age at first marriage for women is 27 and for men is 29 (Wang and Parker 2014). While many young adults will eventually marry, “[a]ccording to Pew Research projections based on census data, when today’s young adults reach their mid-40s to mid-50s, a record high share (25%) is likely to have never been married” (Wang and Parker 2014). Have you remained single? Do you intend to remain single or are you part of the group that is simply delaying marriage until an older age compared to the past?…