Tuesday, Sep. 4

Welcome back from the extended weekend. Today's topic was a continuation of the introduction to sociology, focusing on reading 1 in Seeing Ourselves. It was interesting to ask the questions aloud, getting various ideas from around the room. We also applied Mill's concept of the sociological imagination to yesterday's West Indian American day parade. We discussed the culture showcased, the violence which someone says, "always happens," and ethnic identity in the U.S. This was helpful because we were able to identify one event and build from there a discussion of broader concerns, (i.e. violence and ethnicity). We also took a poll counting the number of students who have attended a parade other than the culture they identify with. Few of us raised our hands. Berger, author of reading two, encourages us to push past the limits of our comfort zones. It is this comfort zone, which Mills describes in reaing 1, which can often make us feel trapped.
For those in the 11AM class, we also used the sociological imagination to discuss marriage. The questions Mills poses on p. 3 in reading 1 asks us to identify the types of men and women emerging in this society. According to one student's demographic data the Lehman female to male ratio is 7:3. This is reflective of a growing trend in colleges and universities in which women outnumber men increasingly. According to sociological studies, women with college or more are more likely to want to date and marry men with an equal amount of educational attainment, however studies show that those men are most likely already married, often to younger women with less education. Others studies indicate that women with college or more will marry eventually, perhaps later in life than was expected by their environment. The largest proportion of single men exists in the working class and poor. It seems that in pursuing higher education, women are perhaps also delaying marriage, however inadvertently. Participation in society shows us that individuals need college degrees to participate in the primary economy. Yet have we thought about what that might mean for other aspects of our private lives, and as we prefer to delay marriage and just live together, what effect does that trend have on the institution of marriage?
For the Monday and Wednesday students we will collect papers regarding questions from Seeing Ourselves and your autobiographies and definitions of sociology. We will discuss the questions in class. For T/ TH students we will also discuss the questions in class together.
Next week we move on to ch. 2 to discuss very technically the tools of empirical research, and we will discuss what it means to be "value free" in sociology.

For further reading on immigrant identities, as mentioned in class, you might purchase or check out Mary Waters' "Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities," in which Waters conducts many interviews and finds that resisting Americanization among West Indian immigrants can help them to succeed in the U.S.