Deviance

Last week in sociology we studied deviance and how that relates to our culture, both in our gender norms as well as in our social class. We read an article called "Saints and Roughnecks" about two groups of kids going to a certain school, and how they were both deviant, but it was seen differently by the public due to a few key issues. Specifically, the "Saints" were a gang of well off, book smart kids who would use their intelligence to find ways to get out of school unnoticed to go hang out for the day. They were seen as being the good kids because of how involved with their school's activities they were, while the "Roughnecks," the lower class kids were seen as trouble from the start. The Saints chose to drive far away from people they knew before causing trouble, but the Roughnecks weren't able to get away, so they were right in the view of those they lived with, which brought much more attention to their actions. The rest of the culture viewed the Saints as being just that: Saints. It really wasn't fair that the Saints were, in many situations, doing much worse than the Roughnecks were! I think that something extremely close to this exists at Stevenson. We go to a school that values success and money far above people's worth as human beings, and as a result, there is a huge difference in the groups of people that everyone is friends with as far as income goes. Most rich kids are friends with rich kids, while most only sort of rich kids are friends with only sort of rich kids (let's be honest, our area is extremely fortunate). This cycle repeats itself over and over, and I saw it in my older brother's grade as well. The expectations and opportunities that we are given are so closely related to social class that it would be ridiculous to think that there was no proof that social class and through that, wealth have a strong influence on the kind of life we are born into.