Thursday, September 16, 2010

Categories

The other day in sociology, we read a poem called, "The Cookie Thief." It doesn't seem like this poem would relate to sociology, but it actually does. The lady in the poem was quick to judge and believed that the man she was sitting next to was eating all of her cookies. At the end of the poem, we find out that in reality the cookies the lady was eating belonged to the man and the cookies the lady bought were in her bag the entire time. In this situation, the lady was quick to judge somebody and it turn it made her look foolish. This poem suggests that maybe we shouldn't be so judging of others, especially if we just met them. A lot of times, we find out something that we were unaware of that completely changes our perspective of somebody. I've dealt with being judged incorrectly before and it's really annoying. My family is Russian and my parents speak with Russian accents. A lot of times people automatically assume that my parents don't understand any English and end up speaking to us really slowly. In actuality my family and I have been living here for more than 12 years and we understand English just fine. I don't really face this stereotype because I don't have an accent, but I've witnessed my parents be stereotyped multiple times. People assume ridiculous things about my parents. One lady actually thought that they didn't know what cell phones were because of where we came from. People are always going to categorize others, but they need to do it in an intelligent way.

4 comments:

  1. Just like the saying goes, you cannot judge a book by its cover. Even though people are different and may be in different categories, most of them can share similarities with others.

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  2. I liked this poem too. I thought it was very funny when the lady found out that it was the other guys cookies. It really shows that we should not be too quick to judge, and that for the most part, people are good.

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  3. I think this poem is great and I agree with you that you can't be quick to judge. Even though someone does not act or sound the same as you, it does not give you the right to judge them.

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  4. I agree that you can't be quick to judge others. The poem really showed how people can be quick to judge even if the person they are judging is doing something nice.

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