Status and Role (Sumblog10)

                What’s your role in society? Is your perceived status associated with that role? Or are they separate? What other factors are associated with your status? That aren’t just your role? These are all questions that I found myself asking when thinking of these two ideas in class.

                First, let’s take a look at a person’s role. Someone’s role is basically where do they fit into society, and what is their job. So for me, I am a student, while I also have a job, the forefront of my role in society is to get educated and bring that into the workforce once I graduate. I once heard an interesting phrase, and it has always stuck with me. “We have the group ‘students,’ so that we can have millions of people labeled as that, instead of ‘unemployed’ or ‘impoverished.’” I thought this was interesting because of how much we rely on those statistics for knowing whether or not our society is doing well, but we sometimes bring a blind-eye so as to not see the potential for harm in our society. I just was always interested by that.

                Next up to bat, status, this term is really interesting to me. Why would this term be interesting you might ask? Well, because of how much discrepancy, so to be a little bit more specific, let’s talk about perceived status. This is what a person thinks your social status is based off of a bunch of ascribed or even achieved identification. This is why I find it interesting, because as people living in the US, specifically myself, who moved to and lives in Wisconsin (newly declared most segregated state in the US) these ideas of what a person is based off what they appear to be are completely off often enough. For example, how big of a role does a person’s race play into what we think of them? Like, if we see a black man have to shop at Goodwill to save money, we generally have fairly negative thoughts about the entire race. Whereas, if we look at a white man shopping there, we wonder what happened to the individual. Then once they are wearing those clothes. We’ll even say they buy the exact same look and it happens to be a suit. We might perceive a higher status for the white guy compared to the black guy just on race alone. Now, this status isn’t just about race, gender, age, appearance and other factors play a role. But if we look at that, how often does a person’s status actually connect with a person’s role?

Found this picture off an interesting blog post about Cisgender folks. If you're interested in gender stratification and privilege check it out; http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2011/11/list-of-cisgender-privileges/