Agenda for 12/17

1. "A Long History of Racial Preference - for Whites"

2. Race - The Power of an Illusion

Open eBackpack Assignment #17

3.  Essential Viewing (videos and links from class):

• "Race the Power of an Illusion pt. 1 
• "Race the Power of an Illusion pt. 2 
• "The Social Construction of Race" 
• "The Unequal Opportunity Race" 

HW - Finish Assignment #17 (eBackpack)

Agenda for 12/16

1. Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore

2. The response to this "controversial" statement 

3. In Holland, Santa Doesn’t Have Elves. He Has Slaves.

4. Learning racial preferences at a young age - The Doll Test

So we learn to group people by race from a young age. But are we actually any good at it?

5. The "Sorting People" Activity

Agenda for 12/15

1. Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore

2. The response to this "controversial" statement 

3. In Holland, Santa Doesn’t Have Elves. He Has Slaves.

4. Learning racial preferences at a young age - The Doll Test

So we learn to group people by race from a young age. But are we actually any good at it?

5. The "Sorting People" Activity

Agenda for 12/12

1. Bill O'Reilly - "President Obama and the Race Problem"

2. FBI 2010 National Crime Statistics - who really commits more crime?

3. #CrimingWhileWhite 

4. The "Affluenza" Defense - white (rich) privilege?

5. Which policing policies and strategies target blacks and minorities? Stop and frisk.

6. Stop and Frisk Data - visualized

7. A "Stop and Frisk" victim?

8. The Stop and Frisk Debate - NY Times

HW - Assignment #16 - Stop and Frisk (eBackpack)

• Visit the websites and videos about "Stop and Frisk" above and then answer the following questions.

1. Define "Stop and Frisk" as used by the NYPD

2. What are the primary arguments in support of "Stop and Frisk?" Provide at least three pieces of specific data that supports the policy.

3. What are the primary arguments against "Stop and Frisk." Provide at least three specific pieces of evidence to support arguments against the policy.

4. What is your opinion of the policy?

• Which arguments are most convincing to you?
• If you agree that it should be used, what would you say to a law-abiding New Yorker who is stopped 5-7 times a year for no other reason that the color of his skin and the neighborhood in which he lives?

• If you disagree with the process, what would you say to those people who live in dangerous areas of NYC and are desperate for the police to be as active as possible in preventing violent crime?

5. Do you think the policy would have the support it does if 87% of the people stopped were white instead of Black and Latino?

Agenda for 12/11

1. CIA Torture Report

2. The "Affluenza" Defense - white (rich) privilege?

3. Which policing policies and strategies target blacks and minorities? Stop and frisk.

4. Stop and Frisk Data - visualized

5. A "Stop and Frisk" victim?

6. The Stop and Frisk Debate - NY Times

HW - Assignment #16 - Stop and Frisk (eBackpack)

• Visit the websites and videos about "Stop and Frisk" above and then answer the following questions.

1. Define "Stop and Frisk" as used by the NYPD

2. What are the primary arguments in support of "Stop and Frisk?" Provide at least three pieces of specific data that supports the policy.

3. What are the primary arguments against "Stop and Frisk." Provide at least three specific pieces of evidence to support arguments against the policy.

4. What is your opinion of the policy?

• Which arguments are most convincing to you?
• If you agree that it should be used, what would you say to a law-abiding New Yorker who is stopped 5-7 times a year for no other reason that the color of his skin and the neighborhood in which he lives?

• If you disagree with the process, what would you say to those people who live in dangerous areas of NYC and are desperate for the police to be as active as possible in preventing violent crime?

5. Do you think the policy would have the support it does if 87% of the people stopped were white instead of Black and Latino?

Agenda for 12/10

Image: Center for Digital Archaeology 2011

CIA Torture Report

1. Click here to see which states pay more for prisons when there are fewer people in them.

The Week asks, "Are for-profit prisons more dangerous than traditional prisons?" Click here for their answer.

2. Match the Crime with the Time. Average sentences for federal drug offences?

3. Incarceration in America - info graphic

4. The problem with the "white culture of violence"

5. Bill O'Reilly - "President Obama and the Race Problem"

6. FBI 2010 National Crime Statistics - who really commits the most crime?

7. #CrimingWhileWhite 

8. The "Affluenza" defense

Agenda for 12/9

Image: Center for Digital Archaeology 2011

1. Click here to see which states pay more for prisons when there are fewer people in them.

The Week asks, "Are for-profit prisons more dangerous than traditional prisons?" Click here for their answer.

2. Match the Crime with the Time. Average sentences for federal drug offences?

3. Incarceration in America - info graphic

4. The problem with the "white culture of violence"

5. Bill O'Reilly - "President Obama and the Race Problem"

6. FBI 2010 National Crime Statistics - who really commits the most crime?

7. #CrimingWhileWhite

Agenda for 12/8

Tim Wise:

"To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the 20th century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.

In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.

But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.

These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.

Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. That’s what we’re telling black people daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera, we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells black men to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.

And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.

But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body."


4. Finish "The House I Live In"

HW - Complete viewing questions for "The House I Live In" (Assignment #15)

Agenda for 12/5

Darren Wilson Interview

Scenes From Ferguson—and Beyond

1. Eric Garner video

2. The Eric Garner "aftermath"

3. Why cops are almost never indicted for shooting someone in the line of duty.

Tim Wise
 
"To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the 20th century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.

In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.

But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.
These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.

Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. That’s what we’re telling black people daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera, we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells black men to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.

And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.

But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body."


4. Finish "The House I Live In"

HW - Complete viewing questions (Assignment #15)

Agenda for 12/4 - Maroon

1. Darren Wilson Interview

2. Scenes From Ferguson—and Beyond

3. Eric Garner video

4. The Eric Garner "aftermath"

5. Why cops are almost never indicted for shooting someone in the line of duty.

3. Finish "The House I Live In"

HW - Complete viewing questions (Assignment #15)

Agenda for 12/2

1. What happened in Ferguson?

2. The response to the grand jury's decision
 
3. Deadly Force in Black and White

4. Continue "The House I Live In."

HW - work on Assignment 15 viewing questions (due Monday 12/8)

Agenda for 12/1

1. What happened in Ferguson?

2. . Deadly Force in Black and White

3. Continue "The House I Live In"

Agenda for 11/24

1. Mr. Parise's Turkey Spectacular

1. Get a turkey (allow 1-2 days for thawing if frozen).

2. Buy a large roasting bag.

3. Spread a liberal amount of softened butter, salt and pepper between the turkey's skin and breast meat.

4. Place a chopped onion, carrots, celery, a sliced apple or orange, and roasting herbs (rosemary, oregano, thyme, etc.) inside the cavity of the bird.

5. Liberally season the outside of the bird with salt and pepper.

6. Place your turkey in the roasting bag (follow directions on box)

7. Place a small amount of water or vegetable stock in the bag along with any extra veggies.

8. Place turkey in your roasting pan UPSIDE DOWN (breast meat down)

9. Tie off bag and make a few slits in the top of the bag (follow directions on bag)

10. Cook until internal meat temp. is at least 165 degrees. Look online for approximate cooking time for the size of your turkey. No basting necessary. Keep oven closed. The more you open it, the longer it will take, and the drier the meat will be.

11. Take turkey out of oven. Flip right side up. Carve, make your gravy, and enjoy!

2. "The House I Live In"

Agenda for 11/20

1. Glamour Magazine names transgender Orono student as one of its 50 Inspiring Women for 2014.

2. Portugal's Drug Decriminalization program

3. Are drugs a health or criminal issue?

• Needle exchange programs
• comment on this padlet
• Methadone clinics
• comment on this padlet
• Drug "Safe House"
• comment on this padlet

4. Incarceration for Drugs - America has 5% of the world's population, 25% of it's prisoners.

5. Despite the arrests - 76.9 percent of drug offenders are rearrested for another drug offense.

6. How effective has America's "War on Drugs" been?

7. Who has an incentive to continue these drug war policies?

8. Why do politicians support these policies?

9. Next on Sociology - "The House I Live In"

HW - Assignment 13

Agenda for 11/19 - Gold

1. Glamour Magazine names transgender Orono student as one of its 50 Inspiring Women for 2014.

2. Portugal's Drug Decriminalization program

3. Are drugs a health or criminal issue?

• Needle exchange programs
• comment on this padlet
• Methadone clinics
• comment on this padlet
• Drug "Safe House"
• comment on this padlet

4. Incarceration for Drugs - America has 5% of the world's population, 25% of it's prisoners.

5. Despite the arrests - 76.9 percent of drug offenders are rearrested for another drug offense.

6. How effective has America's "War on Drugs" been?

7. Who has an incentive to continue these drug war policies?

8. Why do politicians support these policies?

9. Next on Sociology - "The House I Live In"

(US Drug Prisoners) "The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses. - See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.ArVLEO8P.dpuf

(US Drug Prisoners) "The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses."

Source: 

Justice Policy Institute, "Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety," (Washington, DC: January 2008), p. 1.
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08_01_REP_DrugTx_AC-PS.pdf

(Estimated Drug Use by Prisoners in 2004) "17% of State and 18% of Federal prisoners committed their crime to obtain money for drugs."

- See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.ArVLEO8P.dpu

(US Drug Prisoners) "The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses."

Source: 

Justice Policy Institute, "Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety," (Washington, DC: January 2008), p. 1.
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08_01_REP_DrugTx_AC-PS.pdf

(Estimated Drug Use by Prisoners in 2004) "17% of State and 18% of Federal prisoners committed their crime to obtain money for drugs."

Source: 

Mumola, Christopher J., and Karberg, Jennifer C., "Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004," (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Justice, Oct. 2006) (NCJ213530), p. 1.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dudsfp04.pdf

- See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.ArVLEO8P.dpuf

(US Drug Prisoners) "The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses."

Source: 

Justice Policy Institute, "Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety," (Washington, DC: January 2008), p. 1.
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08_01_REP_DrugTx_AC-PS.pdf

(Estimated Drug Use by Prisoners in 2004) "17% of State and 18% of Federal prisoners committed their crime to obtain money for drugs."

Source: 

Mumola, Christopher J., and Karberg, Jennifer C., "Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004," (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Justice, Oct. 2006) (NCJ213530), p. 1.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dudsfp04.pdf

- See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.ArVLEO8P.dpuf

Agenda for 11/18

1. So, do laws the drug test welfare recipients actually work?

2. What about drug testing the politicians? How did Trey Radel vote on a proposed federal law requiring welfare recipients to get drug tests?

3. Finish Drugs in America Keynote

Agenda for 11/17

1. Finish Botany of Desire clip.

2. State Marijuana laws

3. Medical Marijuana - www.procon.org

• What are your thoughts on this issue?
• Use the link above to find at least three arguments to support your POV.
• Upload your arguments to the ebackpack Assignment #14

4. Discuss Portugal's decision to decriminalize drugs

Agenda for 11/14 - Maroon

1. What do you think about the Narcan debate?

2. Drug Test Activity (ebackpack - Assignment #11)

3. What about drug testing for welfare recipients?

4. So who gets government benefits? Why just test the poor?

5. So, do these laws actually work?

6. What about drug testing the politicians? How did Trey Radel vote on a proposed federal law requiring welfare recipients to get drug tests?

Agenda for 11/13

1. More on laws that require drug testing for welfare recipients. What about drug testing the politicians? How did Trey Radel vote on a proposed federal law requiring welfare recipients to get drug tests?

2. In-class Quiz

• Read this article about the debate surrounding drug testing for welfare recipients in Maine.
• What is your POV on this issue?
• Discuss and explain your opinion in a substantial paragraph. Be sure to provide specific reasons for your opinions.

 3. Finish "Drugs in America - Keynote"

4. Clip from Botany of Desire

Agenda for 11/13

1. If not already complete, you should work on:

• Assignment #9 - Gender Unit Assessment
• Assignment #10 - Drug Use in America

2. If you have already completed both of the those assignments, playing games on your iPad or browsing the web is NOT AN OPTION. But you do have these two options:

• A. EXTRA CREDIT ASSIGNMENT: Watch this documentary called "Locked UP: Prison State" on prisons and mass incarceration in America and it's effect on our country. After watching, write a 1 page reflection sharing your thoughts on documentary. Submit your response to the assignment on eBakcpack called "Extra Credit - Prison Documentary Assignment". Due Friday 11/14.
• B. Work on an assignment for another class (you must acutally be doing work for another class.

 3. I have instructed the sub to feel free to use the "Phone Yard" if necessary and to report to me any student who's phone spent time there.

Agenda for 11/7

1. Finish Oxycontin Express

• So what happens to Todd?

2. Continue Drug Use in America Keynote

HW

Assignment #10 - Due: 11/12 (submit your answers to the questions below to the eBackpack assignment)

Answer the following questions in a paragraph each:

1. For you, what was the most surprising, shocking, saddening, or maddening (or all of the above) about what you saw on The Oxycontin Express? Are you surprised at the extent of prescription pain killer abuse in America? 

2. What do you think some of the reasons for this prescription drug crisis are beyond the personal choice to take the drug? Do you think major drug companies and doctors share any of the blame?

3. Choose three graphs about drug use in the United States from the Drugs in America - Keynote that you find the most interesting and do the following:

•  Explain why each of those graphs are interesting to you. 
• Show the three graphs to a family member or friend not in sociology class. Describe their response to each.
• Analyze why you think they responded the way they did. 

4. For you, what was the most surprising, shocking, saddening, or maddening (or all of the above) about Maine's current heroin boom? (see: Maine's Heroin Crisis - video, and Maine's Heroin Crisis - article) 

5. What do you think about the proposal to make Narcan (the drug that can prevent a fatal heroin overdose) more accessible to first responders and addicts? Do you agree or disagree with Gov. Lepage's opposition to that bill? (see: The political debate over a new way to save lives from Heroin overdoses?)

1. Finish Oxycontin Express

• So what happens to Todd?

2. Continue Drug Use in America Keynote

HW

Assignment #10 - Due: 11/10 (submit your answers to the questions below to the eBackpack assignment)

Answer the following questions in a paragraph each:

1. For you, what was the most surprising, shocking, saddening, or maddening (or all of the above) about what you saw on The Oxycontin Express? Are you surprised at the extent of prescription pain killer abuse in America? 

2. What do you think some of the reasons for this prescription drug crisis are beyond the personal choice to take the drug? Do you think major drug companies and doctors share any of the blame?

3. Choose three graphs about drug use in the United States from the Drugs in America - Keynote that you find the most interesting and do the following:

•  Explain why each of those graphs are interesting to you. 
• Show the three graphs to a family member or friend not in sociology class. Describe their response to each.
• Analyze why you think they responded the way they did. 

4. For you, what was the most surprising, shocking, saddening, or maddening (or all of the above) about Maine's current heroin boom? (see: Maine's Heroin Crisis - video, and Maine's Heroin Crisis - article) 

5. What do you think about the proposal to make Narcan (the drug that can prevent a fatal heroin overdose) more accessible to first responders and addicts? Do you agree or disagree with Gov. Lepage's opposition to that bill? (see: The political debate over a new way to save lives from Heroin overdoses?)

 

Agenda for 11/5

1. Gender Unit Assessments Due - submit (however it's best to do so)

2. Drug Use in America

• Intro Keynote
• Oxycontin Express
• So what happens to Todd?

HW - none

Agenda for 11/4 - Gold

1. Gender Unit Assessments Due - submit (however it's best to do so)

2. Drug Use in America

• Intro Keynote
• Oxycontin Express
• So what happens to Todd?

HW - none

Agenda for 10/30

1. What messages about intimate partner violence does this music video send? The lyrics.

2. So why doesn't she just leave?
 
3. What effect may our societal gender stereotypes have on boys (3:50-9:40)? On their academic achievement?

4. What is the "Boy Code."

5. Assignment #9 - Gender Movies (test grade for Gender Unit). 

Either individually or with a partner, use iMovie (or another app of your choice - as long as you check with me first) to create a movie that answers the following question:

• How does our society define masculinity and femininity? 
• What effect do these gender stereotypes have on the way "men" and "women" feel about themselves and experience the world?
• What are some ways these stereotypes are perpetuated  by the media/advertising?
• How might gender stereotypes lead to high rates of rape, and domestic or sexual violence? 
• Do you think America needs to change how we raise our boys and girls (completely your opinion)?
• Be sure to include the following in your movie:
• Gender binary - a definition/explanation of the concept
• Gender codes - a definition/explanation of the concept
• Masculine gender codes/stereotypes
• Feminine gender codes/stereotypes
• Statistics on rape and domestic violence in America
• You movie should include audio, text and images/video. It must answers all questions above and include the required information outline above.
• Due: Friday 11/7
• You will have class time on Monday to work on the project. 

Agenda for 10/29 - Gold

1. VIDEO: Woman Walking Around Manhattan Catcalled 108 Times in 1 Day
  
2. Elliot Rodgers, mass killer. How do our gender norms negatively effect men? “If I Can’t Have Them, No One Will”: How Misogyny Kills Men

3. Continue work on Assignment #9 - Gender Movies (test grade for Gender Unit). 

Directions:
 
Either individually or with a partner, use iMovie (or another app of your choice - it must be approved by me first) to create a movie that answers the following questions:

• How does our society define masculinity and femininity? 
• What effect do these gender stereotypes have on the way "men" and "women" feel about themselves and experience the world?
• What are some ways these stereotypes are perpetuated  by the media/advertising?
• How might gender stereotypes lead to high rates of rape, and domestic or sexual violence? 
• Do you think America needs to change how we raise our boys and girls (completely your opinion)?
• Be sure to include the following in your movie:
• Gender binary - a definition/explanation of the concept
• Gender codes - a definition/explanation of the concept
• Masculine gender codes/stereotypes
• Feminine gender codes/stereotypes
• Statistics on rape and domestic violence in America
• You movie should include audio, text and images/video. It must answers all questions above and include the required information outline above.

• Due: Tuesday 11/4
• You will have class time today and Friday to work on the project. 

Agenda for 10/28

 1. Quiz: Provide gender code analysis for each of the images   below (on eBackpack)

2. Can you find the gender codes in this Sprint ad?

3. A real world effect of gender codes... in our schools?


4. Do we live in a "Rape Culture"?

 

"Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women's daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you're alone, if you're with a stranger, if you're in a group, if you're in a group of strangers, if it's dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you're carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you're wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who's around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who's at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn't follow all the rules it's your fault.

Rape culture is victim-blaming. Rape culture is a judge blaming a child for her own rape. Rape culture is a minister blaming his child victims. Rape culture is accusing a child of enjoying being held hostage, raped, and tortured. Rape culture is spending enormous amounts of time finding any reason at all that a victim can be blamed for his or her own rape.

Rape culture is judges banning the use of the word rape in the courtroom. Rape culture is the media using euphemisms for sexual assault. Rape culture is stories about rape being featured in the Odd News.

Rape culture is tasking victims with the burden of rape prevention. Rape culture is encouraging women to take self-defense as though that is the only solution required to preventing rape. Rape culture is admonishing women to "learn common sense" or "be more responsible" or "be aware of barroom risks" or "avoid these places" or "don't dress this way," and failing to admonish men to not rape.

Rape culture is "nothing" being the most frequent answer to a question about what people have been formally taught about rape."

5. Do we live in a "Domestic Violence" culture? What messages about intimate partner violence does this music video send? The lyrics.

6. So why doesn't she just leave?

7. What are the different types of abuse?

8. What is teen dating abuse? 

Agenda for 10/27

1. What messages about intimate partner violence does this music video send? The lyrics.

2. Does our culture take rape seriously? Glenn Beck’s Skit Mocking Campus Rape.

3. What effect may our societal gender stereotypes have on boys (3:50-9:40)? On their academic achievement?

4. What is the "Boy Code."

5. Assignment #9 - Gender Movies (test grade for Gender Unit). 

Either individually or with a partner, use iMovie to create a movie that answers the following question:

• How does our society define masculinity and femininity? 
• What effect do these gender stereotypes have on the way "men" and "women" feel about themselves and experience the world?
• What are some ways these stereotypes are perpetuated  by the media/advertising?
• How might gender stereotypes lead to high rates of rape, and domestic or sexual violence? 
• Do you think America needs to change how we raise our boys and girls (completely your opinion)?
• Be sure to include the following in your movie:
• Gender binary - a definition/explanation of the concept
• Gender codes - a definition/explanation of the concept
• Masculine gender codes/stereotypes
• Feminine gender codes/stereotypes
• Statistics on rape and domestic violence in America
• You movie should include audio, text and images/video. It must answers all questions above and include the required information outline above.
• Due: Tuesday 11/4
• You will have class time today and Friday to work on the project.