Kanye 2020

Structural Deficiencies

In the midst of a protracted contract dispute between the NFL and the NFL Players Association during the summer of 2011, former Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis took a break from his off season workouts to make a grim prediction: in the absence of football, crime will increase. Admittedly, this is a statement of dubious…

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Reality of Violence

I think that both the readings for this assignment focused around that fact that violence is used for much more than just hurting someone. Many times I think that people feel as though violence is a way for them to feel empowered and not just physically. People react to violence with either fear or respect,…

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Yearning For More

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s piece is very timely, especially with many of the events that have taken place on campus and across the country over the past years. Coates’s is correct though in saying that these issues didn’t begin with the police brutality over the past few years, or with the murder of young Trayvon Martin; these…

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The Ugly Truth

America. Land of the free. A democracy. Where every man is created equal under the law. As I delve further into my sociological education I’m forced to accept that these statements drilled into us as elementary schoolers are far from the truth. The purposeful juxtaposition of these readings reminds us that there is glaring socioeconomic…

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Expectation vs. Reality

One of the biggest problems in this country is ignorance and mis-education. As Ta-Nehisi Coates brings to light during his speech at Johns Hopkins, the way that the majority of the country perceives our nation’s racial issues is seriously flawed. Our country attributes the roots of these issues to the “white racists walking around with…

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When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

Historians and social scientists categorize events and movements in order to fit them into the story they are trying to tell. For this reason, most American high school students know that blacks were discriminated against in the 1950s, and thus the Civil Rights era came about in the following decade. Although simplifications help disperse information…

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Vilification as a Politican Strategy

Roscigno’s piece titled Power, Sociologically Speaking truly resonates in the American political sphere. In a modern nation state such as the United States, the average citizen is blind to the unbalanced, unjust systems of power upon which the bureaucratic government is built. Arbitrary culturally constructed symbols such as race and gender ultimately prime an individual…

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P, P-ful, PWR-Political Power and 21st Century Technology

The 21st century is an information age where people communicate faster than ever before. Phone calls seem unnecessary when questions can often be answered more quickly and directly over a text. Abbreviations and acronyms have transformed modern idioms. Changes in social interactions have transformed the world of politics. From every electoral hopeful having a media…

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“Elite” Citizens United

Power is the capacity to bring about outcomes. We can apply this general definition from Steven Lukes to several aspects of society but the strongest example of power in the United States is the Supreme Court. So powerful that they are answering questions from Lukes essay, “Must those who are powerful be individuals, or can…

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Power at the Crossroads

The varying notions of power posited by Lukes and Roscigno span the spectrum of our collective conception of hierarchical relationships. In doing so, they reveal the fulcrum upon which our conceptions hinge: that of physical dominion over the human body. Over the past year, this is a topic which has continued to ebb its way…

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