Wednesday, September 8, 2010
how does it feel to be black and poor?
This was the question Sudhir Venkatesh asked himself and set out to find out about. At first he didn't know anything about gangs or what went on during gang activities. He was a college student in Chicago and wanted to study sociology. He wanted to find out how it felt to be black and poor, so he made a survey which you had to pick multiple choice answers such as, "very good, somewhat bad, very bad, etc." In the end, he realized this isn't the right way to interview these people. When he met these gangmembers, they mistake him for being mexican and representing a different gang. This wasn't Sudhir's plan. They made him stay overnight and that's when he met J.T who gave him advice on how he should ask his questions. He thinks to himself, why would anyone want to live their life like this? You don't just know the answer, you have to put yourself in their shoes and live it. You can't expect a good answer by asking a question like that. You have to hang out with them and adjust to their lifestyle. So the next time we ask a question like "why do they dress like that?" or "why do they act like that?" Instead of jumping to conclusions and judging them, we need to put ourselves in their position and get to know them.
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I agree that we need to put ourselves in other people's shoes in order to see through their eyes to more effectively solve a problem. By simply being an onlooker, we can never truly know another's emotions and thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said. You can never really get to know how someone lives, or why they do the things they do unless you put yourself in their shoes. I think that Sudhir Venkatesh's way of studying "the projects" was very good because he literally did just that.
ReplyDeleteI agree that in order to understand other people we need to put ourselves in their shoes. Once we do that we are able to see why and how people live the way they do.
ReplyDeleteHey Steph-
ReplyDeleteI agree that Venkatesh can't really understand until he studies them qaulitatively. He needs to watch them and maybe live like them for a while. And yes, this is true for our own lives as well - like you said, we often judge people without really understanding them. But for your posts, you don't have to spend as much time explaining what we did, instead can you go a little further in both - explaining the sociology behind what we study and in relating it to your own life?