The video above is a brief window into some of the cultural and political history behind inequalities within the family. Students in my Social Inequality class this first week have been simply developing the discourse of inequality and sociology–defining it, grasping it, and learning to recognize the concepts in their lives and in the readings. Labor participation rate is but one of many they are grappling with through YouTube videos, podcasts, and readings.

Students are really engaged in the conversations of social inequality at the micro level (one student share how their mom had her car repossessed even though she had paid the bill but had forgetten about it) and at the macro level of how politics has shaped racial, gendered and class inequalities according to Colin Gordon’s USC site on Growing Apart, which is a political history dating back before WWII.

Earlier in the week we listened to an amazing report of coverage by Pro Publica reporter Paul Kiel on The Color of Debt where what appeared to be mostly black female homeowners including the mayor of the city of Jennings in St. Louis had all had the checks garnished for falling on bad times. Click the link in the previous sentence to see the evidence of discrimination against black communities in St. Louis, Newark, and Chicago.

An image of C. Wright Mills as a social media meme. H/T Natasha

All this has really brought home the notion of the sociological imagination being an antidote to the private matters of our individual or personal troubles that affects large groups of people but remains hidden because folk just don’t want to broadcast their shame. The podcast we listened to that revealed the story aired on This American Life on the episode titled Status Update. The segment was Act III: There Owes the Neighborhood. It’s depressing but essential to learn about. The structural oppression of black communities is clear.

I introduced the course, since it’s my first offering of SOC3156 Social Inequality, as a beta test where this new syllabus is “subjected to real world testing by the intended audience”. It helps them and me recognize we are building something and in an experimental phase. All learning should be like this in the beginning. We all loop through phrases of exploring ideas and this is essential when starting something new. Since the 10 undergrads in my course come from diverse disciplinary interests as well as ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds, having a simple prism or theme for the course has been key in our explorations, inquiry, and building of an understanding of social inequalities from a sociological perspective.

The theme and aim of our work and action, as the title of the blog suggests, is developing reasoned arguments, based on proof and evidence, for both despair and hope regarding social inequalities in education, debt, housing, jobs/careers, and more.

Students selected topics for presentations when I instituted a “card game” based on a set of rankings from the Canvas gradebook suggesting a top down hierarchy of performance. In real life such rankings not only matter they are often invisible to most. I used the ranking to give out the suit of hearts. Their performance determined who got the ace, the 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. up to 9 and then there was one joker. I shuffled the sampled desk and let the person at the top of the rank pick the first card and the order was randomly selected as to who would get the first choice of topics to present in class. I’ll explain more later but suffice it to say that i am agitating all their embodied knowledge and notions about class and stratification every way I can. We are challenging our own poverty mindsets through experiential learning, writing, study, re-study, and now we begin to justify our thinking, our reasons for despair and hope.

The first pair of students present on Monday on intersectionaliity. They came up with a great idea as we learned the impact of labor participation after WWII on men. Why not speak to intersectionality with men in mind? I don’t know how it will turn out but given the patriarchal context of our culture, I think the pair presenting might just come up with something out of the pocket and hopeful in the face of the despair that constantly agitates us as we read one article after another, one history after another, at how the decks are stacked against vulnerable and marginalized groups.

More soon.