The coin flip

On day in class we gambled. It was a simple game, you just decided how many coins you want to gamble, flipped the coin, and called what you think it would land on. Once one of you between you or your partner ended up with all the coins, that person moved on to play another person with coins. Eventually one person in the class ended up with all the coins. This shows there's this really small percentage of people at the top with all the money. The more coins you had the more you could afford to gamble, while the less coins you had, the less you could lose. It's much harder than Americans would like to think to acquire money and move up but really the people who end up at the bottom, the majority, stay at the bottom, while the people with all the money, a small percentage, stay at the top. There are a few exceptions of people who can climb all the up the money ladder, but for the most part if your doing any moving up or down at all its just a couple steps. My dad, for example, grew up on the poorer side of Chicago but decided to go to college and get a good job and now he is part of an upper-middle class family. Its interesting to see my family compared to his siblings families because he was the only of of his siblings to go to college so while he moved up, everyone else stayed the same.

Race

The new unit we started is about race. Race is just a socially constructed thing, there is not biological differences between races.  There isn't just black or white and your either one or the other, there is a whole spectrum of skin color. Society defines which race you fall into, and the divisions are just arbitrarily made. People look at others and try to put them into a race category whether it is white, black, Asian, Indian, etc. by looking at someone like Mariah Carey people would never see her as black because she doesn't look like it, and on the other hand people see Barack Obama as only black because of how he looks. I was always confused about race my whole like because I didn't, and still don't, know where I fit in. People ask me all the time what race are you and I'm not offended I just don't even know myself. A lot of people consider me Asian, even though I'm only a quarter. Others ask if I'm Mexican or Hawaiian haha I get everything.

Social Class

It's sometimes hard to accept that in the United States we still have a social class system, because as Americans we like to think that everyone is equal. Our class system isn't written, and not as set in stone as other countries, but that doesn't mean it's easy to climb the social class ladder in America. The social classes are divided based on more than just money. You can have all the money in the world and still not have high class or status. At my high school the division between social classes is not as apparent because everyone pretty much belongs to the same class, but at my middle school it was a small portion of kids from upper middle class families, and a majority of poorer minorities. The division was easily seen. The white, wealthier families dressed in Hollister and A&F, talked differently, cared about school, and school related activities while the poorer, mostly Hispanic kids dressed in cheaper clothes, and didn't care about school. The two different groups rarely interacted with each other. While in middle school, you just think you don't talk to the other group because they're different, but now looking back it's not only because they're different, but they come from a different social class.