Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay
Instructions.
I am from Baltimore Maryland, Please read the attached document to extract my personal information
o
My education and work Baltimore city school / Howard county community
college….. Place employee University of Maryland Medical center as aPsychiatric Nursing Assistant from 2017-current ….. I’ve been employees since I …o
Plagiarism of any kind will not be tolerated. This means that you must submit your own work in your own words. Quotes taken from other authors must be quoted and cited correctly. The penalties for plagiarism are outlined in the Student in the HCC Student Handbook (Links to an external site.), and will be enforced to the fullest extent.
HOW TO WRITE YOUR PAPER
“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both…. No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey…. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society…. Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another— from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessments of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self— and to see the relations between the two.” — C.
Wright Mills.
This assignment asks you to write an autobiographical describing the intersection between your biography and the historical times in which you live using your “sociological imagination” as discussed in C. Wright Mills’ essay “The Promise
download & quota;. What sociological factors have shaped your life
so far?
What sociological factors have shaped your life so far? Your goal is to demonstrate your sociological understanding through an application of the sociological imagination to
an analysis of your life. The key to showing a sociological understanding is to connect your personal experiences, behaviors, and attitudes to the larger social Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay
structure. For example, think about your cultural background, socialization, race, ethnicity, class, gender or sexual orientation. How have any of these factors, or the
intersection of any of them, given you advantages or disadvantages throughout life?
Write your autobiography detailing the following:
the semester that have had a significant impact on your life, for example:
o Birth, location
o Family structure
o Racial/Ethnic/Cultural Background
o Social class/education/work history
on your life;
some others, as the most significant to shaping your life;
Priceless Baltimore- An Autobiography
A man can dream, they say. I believe a woman- a black woman- can dream, and dreaming has always been the propeller that has been and still pushes me to be what I am today. My name is (full name) daughter of (parents’ names). Well, I like to call myself the daughter of Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland, has always been the little cocoon into which my mind has always folded and retracted back to whenever I need the motivation to push the dreams that drive my life. I was born and grew up in a black neighborhood. That is what I later understood was how such places were referred to Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay.
I understood that going to school was the norm- just like all parts of the United States. However, going to the types of schools I saw on television was not what I experienced. The rest of America was in a better place, or so I thought. In Baltimore City School, I nurtured my education to what I would call ‘primary education. Not once in my school life had I envisaged that there was essence and importance of shooting my grades out of the scope within my horizon. Baltimore taught me that life demanded one to live- never mattered how. I grew up an average learner, and my dream and aspiration, just like any Baltimorean young school-going kid, was to clear high school and get a job. Crime and drugs were prevalent, and I knew that I had to avoid them, which was more complicated than getting hooked to them (Sweet et al., 2020). Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay Vivid horrific experiences of some friends I grew up with still pierce through my heart, irredeemable. I later attended the Howard County Community College. This was a significant step, coming from a family that no one had set foot in college.
The past year has been a hectic one. The Covid-19 Situation made my responsibilities shift from basically hard to almost impossible. Another blow struck after my mother got a stroke. This meant I had to juggle between being more than just a daughter to her. All my life, she had taught me to always be there for family, and I can count the number of times I could feel her absence in my life. As a mother and an employee at the University of Maryland Medical Centre, I need to do all y duties diligently, and the last thing I would want is for my children to feel left out.
A spark in me has always been ignited every time I think about the horrible things I saw while growing up. The murder of Freddie Gray- one wonders if a human with a brain could do such horrendous acts to a fellow human (Sweet et al., 2020).Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay I was pushed by an inner desire to understand how people think towards others and shift their views and perceptions. As one grows in aspirations of wanting to become somebody in society, they learn that the nature of people is more personal than is it generally human (Mills, 1959). Police brutality has been a thing in Baltimore, and Freddie’s death was not any different. It is the way of death that puzzled me- I had to be a medical practitioner. I had to save the lives of future Freddies, and not by dealing with them after battering, but by dealing with the people’s minds at a young age- people of all races. I am inclined to think that race is more of a perception than color. As a psychiatrist, I understand better, but with very little to affect the whole sea with a seemingly fixated mindset.
It is not just the history of my home city that burns me from inside, but as well the realization that the life of an average black person is bound to be thrice as hard as that of a white person. I am a middle-class citizen earning a medium wage, just enough to sustain and make ends meet for my children and my mother. It is unlike me to work out of impulse- I am driven by the surrounding social, economic, and political states. I have grown not to see the essence of investing much. A study in 2015 about the disinvestment rates in Baltimore gives me a vivid picture and makes sense after all. After reading this study, I was revolutionized, typically me, and this cemented another layer of the factors for the status quo in the black neighborhood. Black populations are neglected from all spheres, and as such, one must understand why it is hard to find blacks investing when they earn too little (Theodos et al., 2020). Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay A younger me would believe that Baltimore is a replica of entire America, then an older me watched something different on television. Right now, it is not a matter of thinking, imagining, and monitoring- I am experiencing this. I, however, cannot say that my life has faced racial discrimination at specific points. Still, I can say that the color of my skin and the identity of my cultural background have made inevitable the endless struggles I underwent and still undergoing. Being a Baltimorean is priceless, and so is being everything that I have become. That is me, in a nutshell.
References
Mills, C. W. (1959). Chapter One: The Promise. In The Sociological Imagination essay. https://sites.middlebury.edu/utopias/files/2013/02/The-Promise.pdf.
Sweet, S., Alexander, G., & Alexander, R. (2020). The death of Freddie gray and its impact on homicides in Baltimore and Maryland. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 65(5), 1539–1547. https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14499
Theodos, B., Hangen, E., Meixell, B., & Foster, L. (2020). (rep.). Neighborhood Investment Flows in Baltimore. Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/102976/neighborhood-investment-flows-in-baltimore_1.pdf Baltimore- Sociological Imagination essay.