Reflective Essay
Courtney von Minden
Throughout the course of life, one will learn many things. Some things may see obvious at first, like how the sun goes down at night and the moon appears, while others, not so much. The term obvious can mean a few things it can be the commonsense definition, it can mean, “being in the way” or ‘the obvious’ can be surface realities which need to be looked beyond. This semester in Sociology of Social Justice I unlearned some things I had once thought were obvious. On the first full day of class, we were asked to check where all of our clothes we were wearing were made. Most of us said things like “China” or “Japan”. Now this was something I thought was going to be obvious. Nowadays, most things we, as consumers purchase, are made in China, or Japan, outsourcing the labour because it is cheaper to make the products overseas and ship it here then it is to make them in Canada. Although this fact is true, and fairly obvious at that, what was not obvious to me was how some individuals in the class would say their clothes were made somewhere other than China and Japan. Some people said their clothes were made in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Considering the things one can hear in the news about the wars in the Middle East, I thought it was safe to assume outsourcing labour to those countries was out of the picture. Needless to say, I was wrong. Just because something seems obvious, that does not mean that it is true.
Something else I learned on that first full day of class was something Peter Berger once said, “Social reality turns out to have many layers of meaning…the discovery of each new layer changes the perception of the whole”. I do not know where Mr. Berger thought of this, but it has stuck with me since Charles told the class of it. This saying helped enhance my understanding of the sociological issues discussed in this class because, without having heard Charles say this phrase, I would not have thought to give some of the topics discussed any further thought. I would not have tried to go beyond the surface meanings of some things like the concept of socioeconomic class. Socioeconomic class is “a relative position in a structurally and historically defined hierarchical network of social relations that predicts levels of access to power and control in multiple contexts of institutional and daily life”. Being a lower class citizen of only twenty one years of age, I have never experienced too much class division in my life thus far. I see people driving in nice,expensive cars, who no doubt live in nice, big houses, but I do not feel like these individuals are in access to endless amounts of power or money for any reason other than the fact that they probably worked hard to get where they are today. I have worked hard in my life so far, but considering my life as a young adult is just starting, there is nothing holding me back from reaching the same level of potential that these other individuals have reached in their lives. This course as a whole has taught me to never take for granted what I have in my life, because many people in the world have much less. It has also taught me to always try to be a smart, hard-working citizen in my community, and to always try to help those in need.
