Things that I changed my opinions on after SOC 119: When I first strolled into class 15 weeks ago and heard Sam talk, my initial thoughts were “this guy is a complete druggy.” Honestly, I felt as though Sam was speaking like had lost his mind after thinking too hard or something, and considering that our first lecture was about the power of the mind, I found that to be quite appriate. As Sam spoke on and on about race and equality, I began to become enlightened in a way. By the end of the class, I was a changed man or looked at things very differently. But despite my doubts of how much effect the course was really having on me and how I thought my convictions could never be completely changed by a class, my views were indeed being changed right before my eyes without me really noticing at all. I thought despite everything I read and learned that it simply made me more aware of certain issues and broadened my perspective but didn’t really change any of my feelings on things. The class was very eye opening for me, and I think that there are a few things that have really stuck out to me over time. The main thing that really stuck in my mind was the inequalities of life. I used to wish I was white because I thought it would make me cool, I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked like them. Before Soc, I thought we were at a place of inequality, especially since Obama was president. I thought that if we could elect a black man president, we had finally overcome inequality. But after soc, I realize that in reality, he comes off as more white than black, and people still don’t respect Obama and continue to discriminate against him even though he is the most powerful person in the world. On a more global scale, I found it so interesting how we, as a country, always want to be on top. The analogy of how we are on top of the hill and just kick everyone else who is not one of us off makes complete sense and I can totally relate to it. Through Soc, I learned how to put race into perspective. I learned that we are all innately racist, or prejudice, depending on which ever side you are on. It also helped me to see more about myself and how I feel in regards to race. I would like to see myself as a generally unbiased person, but I realized that I have my own biases just like everyone else.

Fear is a powerful thing, it consumes us and changes the way we behave. It is the anti catylist to productivity. A wise man once said, there is nothing to fear but fear itself. The question that was asked in class of whether we would allow our children to walk to school if we lived within less than a mile made an impression on me. I think that it would be completely reasonable to have your child walk to school if they are old enough. The media paints this hellish world we live in with no mercy. We all conveniently represent evil entities that are capable of abducting children. It is interesting because it’s not just what we see, it’s what we don’t. We don’t see the children walking home every day and getting home safely. That doesn’t make for a very newsworthy story. The good done in the world isn’t worth saying up because it doesn’t stir up as many emotions as the bad does. If we knew that everything was fine and dandy in the world, we wouldn’t be inclined to listen to the news because there wouldn’t be any drama to stir up. Many people are very overprotective of their children and are afraid that bad things will happen to them. I can understand this because we always hear and read about children being kidnapped or assaulted or raped, and this obviously would give us a negative view on the world and make us more protective of our children. As we heard in class, there is not really that much crime in the world, and most people are good. I really believe that most people are good and yes, there is crime, but I do not think that people should assume that the person walking down the street towards them is intending to do something wrong to them, as many people seem to think. There are external factors that we parents do take into consideration though. For example there is the reasonable threat of getting hit by a car. Kids crossing the street alone are highly likely to be hit by a car, much more likely than getting abducted. I would fear my child getting hit by a car or getting bullied, that’s why I wouldn’t let him/her walk to school alone. 1 out of every 5 kids are bullied, so that is more than enough reason for me to want to walk him/her to school. As I said before, Fear is a powerful thing, it consumes us and changes the way we behave. It is the anti catylist to productivity. A wise man once said, there is nothing to fear but fear itself. I am afraid for the safty of my child, so if that means he/she has to miss out on the experience of walking to school alone, so be it.

Annually, we (America) spend about 350 million dollars to aid Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. None of that money ever actually goes to Haiti though, that money goes right back into the USA. Instead of giving Haitians the money, we spend the money inside of our country (America) on goods, like food and medical supplies, and then we ship it all to Haiti.
Rice, being a staple in the Haitian diet, is the main product that is purchased by us (American government) and sent to Haiti where the rice is then resold to Haitian households in bulk for reduced prices. We (America) get to stimulate our own economy by purchasing our rice, Haitian households get cheap prices on Rice, and nobody goes hungry, everyone wins, right? Wrong, this system only benefits the very rich American rice farmers who export cheap rice to Haiti and the very poor Haitians who can’t afford anything other than dirt cheap rice. By forcing the Haitians to be reliant on the low-cost U.S grown rice, we (America) monopolize the market, putting Haiti in an economic headlock.
The Haitian economy will greatly benefit, but that does not mean that ours (Americas) will be hurt though. I understand that we need to protect our own American interests when considering international affairs, but I can assure you that no American farmers will be harmed from this move; in fact it will most likely benefit them. By having our (American) farmers buy out Haitian farming land overseas, we (America) will still have control over Haiti and their main source of income through our American rice farmers, and the Haitians won’t have to live in poverty. The American farmers can hire on Haitian workers to maintain their overseas farms at cheap prices due to the low costs of living in Haiti. Also, we (America) can focus on giving more subsidies to the farmers by cutting out the transportation costs since all operations are outsourced to Haiti.
With a tiny GDP and a giant unemployment rate, Haiti is struggling to stay afloat. As the most powerful country in the world, it is our (Americas) obligation to give a lending hand to those in need. While foreign aid might be good at face value it leaves much to be desired. As the saying goes “give the man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach the man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” My amendments to the Haiti foreign aid program will give Haiti that leg up to sow its own crop instead of being dependent on ours.

Penn State is a primarily white school, so as you probably guessed; the majority of people who voted were white. With this in mind, let’s look at the psychology of how people think. We want to put people in power who are similar to us; we want to be able to relate to our leaders. People with different names are not people who we can relate with, so naturally we won’t vote or them.
I think the Student Government elections this year were very similar to this example. Sam has use the resume example often in class, where he places two resumes with the same qualifications side by side and shows that the white sounding name gets called back significantly more often than the black or brown sounding name. It’s not just interviews though; the same principles are reflected by students against their own fellow students. Who are we to say that one person better than another based solely on the name?
People want to be able to relate to each other and there will always be this us and them sort of mentality. With this mentality, we will block others who aren’t on our side. Another factor that plays into is these pre-conceived biases we have. Sam showed us a video of black kids and white kids determining how good or bad dolls were based on skin color. Almost all of the children consensually agreed that the black doll was the bad doll and the white one was the good one. This video sparked memories of when I was just a kid. I always wished I was white. Why though? Why did I feel as though it was a better thing to be white? Was it because I wanted to fit in with the rest of the white kids in my school, or was it because I was convinced that black was bad?
Obviously those kids that got tested were convinced that black was bad. What cuased them to think that though. The civil rights movement changed all of that in 1963, so why are we still feel the aftermath of racism. It is not apperant in our society, but there are underlying prejudices that we have. We are naturally inclided, for our own benefit and safety, to make assumptions about people before getting to know them. And after years of slavery black people just got branded with that label of the inferior, or bad people. Those steriotpes are just perpetuated throughout society with people who actually fulfill those steriotypes and give white people a reason to think blacks are inferior.
So that is why I belive people are not voting for people with different names. That’s whats holding back diversity.

I remember as a child I used to wish that I was white. I always blamed not having friends on the fact that I was colored, different. Who’s to say what’s different and what is right though. America is a melting pot of minorities, white people have almost become the minority in America and in less than 50 years Whites are expected to be a minority.
It is quite sad to see that not only Americans but other societies see blacks as innately bad or inferior. The fact that innocent children who have no preset biases find that blacks are bad says something about the way that we as a society approach race. In some context the message of “blacks are bad” has been subliminally pounded into our heads but we are too sensitive to even mention it. Children are uncensored though because they are so sensitive and young, so the fact that they see that blacks are bad means that the message is being pounded into our head.
It’s defiantly a bad thing that kids are identifying dolls as good or bad based solely on race but that isn’t to blame on the children. Similarly, when a child curses, it is not the child that synthesized the word, it was an external force that exposed the child to that message. The fact that we are exposing our society to the message that blacks are inferior is a problem; it is the source of our problems. We need to look for where this is coming from. Is it the media? Hollywood? Or could it be cases like Zimmerman? The fact that he got away with killing a young boy and he still has his gun shows how society fosters this believe that
The problem of racial inequality has been perpetuated throughout time in generations before mine. Although “equality” has been bestowed upon the colored people of this country, how is it still possible that we have racism? The worst part is that we can’t even see the racism penetrating our society. People see us as different. They always will, there will always be an Us and a them. There will always be a sense of racism. What really baffles me though is that the racism is targeted as blacks. In a society run by whites, the history books are written by the winners, so while we might feel as though we have gotten the victory by gaining our rights. Did we really gain equality. It will take generations to be able to integrate ourselves into a society run by whites. I don’t even think that turning them into a minority will solve the problem though because the top 1 % will still own 90 % of the wealth. As long as they are on top, the will stay there.

We were lucky enough to have a US marine in our class because he could give us the most in-depth look at what went on in the Iraqi-American war. The media has done a lot in the sake of protecting the government’s interests and lobbyists practically run Washington. Anyways, that is beside the point. At first, before I took SOC 119 I never thought it was appropriate to question the reason and the face behind 9.11. Who really caused it? Whose fault is it? Was it truly the terrorists or the government? There was once a time when I felt as though questioning the cause behind 9.11 was questioning the deaths of over a thousand dead Americans, not to mention the thousands of dead soldiers in Iraq. I was afraid to even mention that it might be a conspiracy.

After Soc though, I feel as though the act of not questioning was an injustice in and of itself. By not questioning, we are practically saying, let us just find someone to blame this tragedy on so that we can avenge the dead Americans, it doesn’t matter who it is, as long as it is someone we can all hate. The government wouldn’t suffice though because they were the ones recouping against the terrorists by declaring war. Speaking of the troops, they fight and die every day so that Americans like us, can sit around in a room to question what they are fighting for. Our freedoms are what America was built on and not too long ago I felt as though some of those freedoms should be put to the side at the expense of the soldiers.
For example I would have been too afraid to question an ROTC member how they were going into a war run by corporate America and a blood thirsty oil trade with non-lucid agendas. I felt as though I was defiling our nation, its troops, and the victims of 9.11 by questioning. Now I know that it is not only ok, but our duty to question. If we don’t question the terrorists win, they have successfully silenced the people.
Personally I believe that America is one of the best countries in the world. I have always thought that and Soc 119 only reinforced that. While it is true, we are on the top of the metaphorical food chain, that isn’t such a bad thing or a crime. Someone has to be on the top, so why not us. The way we push others below us down is also a natural part of what we do. I am just surprised that we continue to get away with it. Bottom line is that we need to appreciate our freedom of speech and act upon it. It is in this way that we can truly honor those affected by terrorists.

Going into SOC 119, I heard one thing over and over and over again. You will either hate Sam or you will learn to love the guy. At first, Sam came off as this kind of weed head, always-trippin kind of guy, which I did not respect. Initially, I thought of him as someone who only did his thinking while he was under the influence of some drug we have never heard of and so his ideas all seemed ludicrous to me. However, as time went on, and more and more of the facts began to accrue on the table, I began to see that Sam Richards did a lot of thinking, whether under the influence or not, but it got me thinking too.
One real thing that stuck out for me was the whole policy of “white power” I still cant get over how there is racism today. I thought that racism had been permanently dispelled from our society in 1963, little did I know that the residual still haunts us though. I had no idea that blacks were still being discriminated against, I couldn’t fathom it. When thinking of racism I think of it as being the most heinously viewed crime in America.
It wasn’t the facts and figures that really got to me though. While I am a great proponent against inequality and prejudice, I find myself doing it. As a Muslim this is ironic, especially in light of nine eleven.
Sam had me thinking about all of the times I had walked down the street, across from a black person and worried that I might be robbed. I now realize that this is my inner racist self. Blacks are depicted to me as people who are capable of causing me harm when white people are just as capable (just to clarify, I am not afraid of all black people, this was just an example). It is funny to think that just a semester ago I would have been offended of someone fearing me for being a Muslim, but at the same time I had this same prejudice in myself.
I remember, as a child, I used to think that white was the dominant race. I always wished I could be white and so I tried to highlight every single semblance I could so that I could try and be like white people. I remember how I used to say to everyone that everyone in my family is white, as if I was the black sheep because I was a little darker. I never really realized the significance of this until after sam pointed out how white power and racism is still very prevalent in our society. I don’t know how this thought of white people being superior got instilled into my head though, but the scary thing is that it did.

I grew up in an extremely religions family. My father was a sheikh, which is basically the Muslim equivalent of a priest who leads congregation at a mosque. You would imagine that my views are completely biased, and in a way I can completely agree. My vision has been affected by my upbringing; HOWEVER, it does not define it. As I grew older and older, my views were influenced by creationists and evolutionists alike. I have heard every single side to every single argument, or I have at least strived to do so. Everyone believes in something they deem logical, so if something is logical to them it can also be logical to me right? Actually, the difference between everyone’s views on creationism vs. evolutionism is either the amounts of information each side is exposed to, or a staunch belief in something they can’t prove.
Anyways, back to the point. After seeing both sides, the logic, the science, the scriptures, included, I deduced my own conclusions, which just happened to coincide with my religious upbringing. So ultimately, my views didn’t change at all since I was just a young boy going being influenced by dad. However, one important thing did change. While I used to simply follow my religion because my parents told me to, I now follow it because I did the research and I honestly wholesomely believe in what I was taught. I believe that God did put us on this earth, but I don’t believe that we evolved from chimps.
On the religious side, my scripture, the Quran, says that Adam and Eve were the first people on earth which means that monkeys could not have evolved into humans.
On the scientific/ logical side, we have never seen any proof of a half human/monkey. There were monkeys, and then there were humans. It doesn’t stop there though; there has never been any half/half anything, no half plant half fish. There were just plants, then fish. This is why evolution is just a theory, which is what it has been for hundreds of years. Evolution has not yet been proven and if we spent hundreds of years searching for blatant proof and we haven’t found any, evolution obviously isn’t the answer.
When I tell people I belive in creationism, their first reaction is to call me ignorant, and they would try to prove evolution through adaptation and natural selection. I belive in those, and nowhere in my scripture does it say that those two things didn’t happen. But natural selection is different than evolution. Just because animals who are inadequate die off, doesn’t mean a completely new animal will come out of the process. A dog will never become a cat. A chimp will never become a human.

Plants talking to people, right… maybe Sam is the one on shrooms. Seriously, how could somebody hear plants speaking to them, it just defies all the laws of the universe. Or perhaps, it is these very laws that we don’t understand. I say, maybe, this shaman that Sam encountered during his expedition to Mexico could have exploited some plants for their extraordinary healing properties. Some plants just have the capability to do extradonary things that we don’t understand. That’s, why we go to school, so we could learn about how plants are used in drugs and how drugs are used to heal people. Now I’m not one to judge the method of learning, but if taking a couple of hallucinogens and talking to plants can give you enough knowledge to sustain a community and all its medical needs, as well as a Harvard PhD. Then by all means you should definite be a druggie. But in all seriousness I believe that is more than just plants talking to him, I believe that these healing traditions were acquired through years and years of tradition and trial and error. This sort of learning crafted many young tribesmen into the great shamans they have become. Back to the topic of shrooms, I think Sam was on something this class, because he was feeling weird vibes, and I’m sure he was hearing plants talking to him but he didn’t want to freak us out. He brought up an interesting point this class when he mentioned that drugs are keys that unlock doors in our mind to realms which are beyond our comprehension. While we use these keys for recreational activities, it is very possible that these shaman are using these keys to unlock sectors of the mind which allow us to communicate with the spirits of plants and other life, which perhaps is the origin of medicine. Or perhaps, those college students at Harvard getting their PhD use drugs and shrooms just cause it’s fun, and knowledge is actually gained in the classroom. How could these natives have learned about these drugs in the first place and their effects without having had guidance from the spirit realm? And if the only way is by unlocking doors in our mind through these drugs, then theoretically it’s impossible for these drugs to have been the cause of medicine. So that must mean that they have gained their spiritual guidance through their minds. And those drugs are only a catalyst to the discovery of other drugs. So to conclude people discovered these medicines with the power of their minds through reason and deduction. Drugs, school, and PhD’s only acted as an enabler to the discovery of weed.

The words black, African American, and dark skinned all have incredibly negative connotations attached to them. We as a society decided that there was to be a taboo with anything regarding black. Why is it that we as a society decided that we must be so sensitive around blacks? It acutally seems as though we are perpetuating a form of covert racism by acting overly sensitive towards black people.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we should forget of many great men and women who fought for the rights of African Americans. We will never forget the atrocities that plagued the black communities for centuries. The abuse their race has undergone should not be forgotten or disregarded, but surpassed.
We should rise above these struggles the black community suffered. We should go above it and cherish their resilience and efforts as a relic of the past.
Just the fact that we get too offended to even point out the darkest skinned person in the class just proves how we regard blacks differently, which is where white supremacy is derived from. Stating that someone has dark or light skin shouldn’t be a cultural issue, it should be an issue of how much melanin someone has in their skin. We should admire the beauty in the anthropologic background of people of dark and light skin alike. Yet we still treat skin like a social identifier.
All of the negativity connected to pigmentation is so primitive, but it has not yet been shed off of the skin of our society. This cancerous protrusion awkwardly encumbers our civilization and people can’t just forget about it overnight.
Thankfully now though, we are on the right track, we are heading in the right direction. Only a couple of years ago, the color of someone’s skin determined their status within the echelons of society. Now, anyone can be anything they want to. Now, the color of someone skin only affects their status instead of determining it, it’s like Sam said, 3 out of 5 times, the white man will be picked in an interview. This subconscious categorization we are bound to subject upon others makes us naturally prone to our racist ways, and why hate against the white man when bringing down the black man is no new concept?
Is that the mentality of our culture? Can it be fixed? Perhaps? We have come a long way from the days of enslavement. Blacks may not recover from this traumatizing event for years to come, but at least for now we can be sensitive about the topic, at least until blacks and whites are truly equal. If only this world were black and white.