Read through a recent copy of your area’s or your school’s newspaper. Make a list of topics covered by the newspaper to which sociologists might want to apply the sociological imagination. Can you find topics that you can characterize as existing at the intersection of private troubles and public issues? Which of these topics would you, as a new sociologist, like to study and why?
In this chapter, the authors discussed poverty as a private trouble and a public issue. Together with a small group, or your own make a list of sociological factors that may help explain the existence and persistence of high levels of poverty in the United States, particularly in the inner city and rural areas. Put this list in a notebook or save it to your personal computer so you can refer back to it periodically. Check back on the list throughout the term to see if and how your explanatory variables might expand or change.
This chapter covers many of the early sociological thinkers and theorists. One that the text considers is Harriet Martineau. One of the things Martineau did in her work was use the Declaration of Independence to point out anomalies--contradictions between a society’s declared morals and their actual practices. Martineau pointed to the treatment of slaves and women that seemed to contradict the Declaration of Independence’s notion of freedom. If Martineau were traveling around the United States today what anomalies might she find?
In the days when African American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois was writing, explicit racism--literally “being cursed and spit upon”--was a common occurrence for Black Americans, helping to create the kind of painful “double consciousness” about which Du Bois theorizes. Today, most Americans deem such overt acts of racism unacceptable. But other, more covert acts of discrimination, against Black Americans exist today. Read the transcript of the following talk at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/audio/pwilliams.html by legal scholar Patricia Williams for the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. After reading the talk, describe how Williams was made to experience double consciousness.
The authors discuss how ethnocentric thinking creates barriers to sociological understanding. Consider what you think you know about the specific beliefs, activities, and lifestyles of people in other countries. Ask yourself how you feel about these other people’s beliefs, activities, and lifestyles. Do you feel your society’s beliefs, activities, and lifestyles are more normal, right, or good? Why or why not? How do these feelings affect your ability to sociologically understand these societies?
