Blog: Fail (Part 1)

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I have FAILED.

By trade I am a numbers person, but I dabble in sociology. Because of the interest in sociology, I often follow trends trying to understand why people think the way they do.

I, personally, grew up on what my town considered “the wrong side of the railroad tracks” and so my playground companions were a mix of colors and religions. I didn’t consider the skin color difference except when running through the sprinklers, since I had only a short window to play with my pale skin and others had a larger window. This difference was no more important to me than asking the taller kids to get something I couldn’t reach. My early experiences filtered through my mind and entrenched in my subconscious. It baffled me when I went off to college and discovered people attached socio-economic characteristics to skin color, and, to tell you the truth, this pre-judging based on melanin continues to be an issue in my social interactions. At some level, I just can’t and will never understand it, even when I observe these same behaviors based on my adult socialization in myself. Likewise I can’t really grasp judging skills based on visible gender, for instance the assumption of females and math (of which I am glaring example of how wrong that assumption is). Hence the ongoing studies in sociology.

I am just trying to understand humanity.

#AllLivesMatter is basic to how I live. But I know our American society has an imbalance. As of 2010, 50.8% of the United States of America was female, with the average actually higher among adults since more boys are born (by 0.05%) but more women survive – the changeover of more men to more women happening between 30 and 40 (Age and Sex Composition by US Census 2010 – – LINK broken as of 4/20/2022, likely replaced with a pdf related to the 2020 Census) – due to society’s encouragement of men practicing more dangerous behaviors and taking riskier occupations rather than a more equitable split of occupational risks.

Yet even with more women than men, viewing our society through our entertainment, you would think the ratio was closer to 4 males per 1 female.

Then there is the Melanin Split. I am not going to call it a racial split since only one race exists, the human race. I am going to call it what it actually is, a constructed split defined by how well we tan. In America we are 70% white, 15% black, 5% Asian with other mixes added in and 16% identifying as Hispanic. Growing up I didn’t notice a difference in Hispanic Melanin Split since the local white population included a high number of mid-eastern and Italians and they all tan about the same and had similar dark hair, which was all my child-self cared about. In addition one should consider a ratio of 15% of immigrants of all kinds into America, including Russian, Japanese, and English.

Well, the post is getting a little long, so I am going to break it into two parts. Find out about my big FAIL tomorrow.