Month: October 2017

A huge reason why we still struggle with racism has to be all the past mistakes we have made and have done nothing to fix them. Back in the 1800s when factories where becoming a very common occurence, the U.S. government allowed many european immigrants to come and work, although they had many freed slaves that could have done the job. This allowed the white people to get jobs and get a decent ammount of wealth which allowed them to have an advantage over the blacks that were already over here. Another reason why racism is still a thing is because of stereotypes, such as black men are aggressive and commit crimes and mug people. This is completely false. Another reason is geographic location. We shoved the blacks into crowded poor areas and did not give any government assistance to these areas. A common stereotype to black people is that black people are mooching off of wellfare, and I have actually heard some people tell me that black people had kids so that they could collect more benefits from the government. Yes, I have actually heard people actually say that. People being uneducated is a huge reason as well, if they do not know the facts they cannot possible make true statements.

Social change is a huge factor in life, and I think sometimes people forgot how we can impact each other. Take for example gay rights, it may not impact you personally so you may not care about them. But if you stop and think about the millions of people who are being denied the rights they deserve as human beings, you start to want to fight for them. That is true for all sorts of changes needed. Think about how you could make the world a better place. It will not always have a direct impact on you but if you fight and strong for others rights there will be a dramatic decrease in violence in the world and there will not be so much hate. We should care about social change because it can make the Earth a better place, and that is never a bad thing. We should all band together so we can make the world a better place for everyone. What is the point of living if not everyone is happy? I think the world is the complete opposite and it needs to be changed. This world is a mess and we need change and we need it fast.

I believe that in order to get anything accomplished, you need to take something that the community is familiar with and give it a boost. Duhigg talks about in his piece how Warren changes up church to make it more appealing to people by “[H]e told people to wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts, if they felt like it” This quote was about churchgoers! Normally when you think about church you think about dressing up, but Warren realised that more people would want to go to church if it was more relaxed and not so focused on dressing up and being boring. Epstein, in her “Aids Inc” Epstein talks about how the Y-Centers “young people could learn to play basketball, volleyball…” Now both of these quotes talk about giving a cool factor to things and being able to handle something by letting the people choose what they want to do, but in both cases, things do not work as planned. The AIDS epidemic still hit South Africa hard, and Warren in Duhiggs writing found out that church groups were getting together and discussing the bible for ten minutes then chitchatting. In order to get things to work you need a hard hitting approach, but while being able to not show the hard hitting intentions.

I think this is another great example of a communtiy banding together to fight for what is right, and it again plays on the idea of social cohesion. One of the main points I noticed in this reading is that one of the most important factors in determining how much something would succeed depended on weak ties. The article explains weak ties as a friend of a friend. I can see how this would be the most important part to starting a movement or getting something done. Strong ties are just in between small groups of people and no one else will relate to that yet weak ties, everyone has friends that are not mutual friends with all of their friends. And with this, people from all over can hear about someone whose friend’s friend did this and all that, and it can create support from someone the person does not even know. Weak ties allow the information to flow through a community, so if you do not even know who the person is you can still be on their side. I think that applies for a lot of things. We talked about gay rights, well instead of mothers fighting for their gays sons rights, it is the mothers friends also fighting, which boosts up numbers of support, and that can be said for any cause, the more people you have supporting something, the stronger the fight will be!