The Privilege Line Activity

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Recommended: Income and wealth inequality sociology

I thought that the “privilege line” activity that we did in front of Synapsis was a very interesting experiment because of the different opinions that everyone seemed to have when we discussed it afterward (which I will elaborate on later). I was placed in the “middle class” group, which is more or less what I expected because of my family income. The questions that were asked reminded me of the reading that we did about unpacking the invisible backpack. Many of the things that were questioned were things that I didn’t think about much in my day to day life, especially for the steps that I took forward or didn’t move on, i.e. never had to turn off electricity or oil, didn’t have prostitutes in neighborhood growing up, parents not paying full …show more content…

We talked about how we probably would have taken more half steps if we knew that was an option. I did take a few half steps: one was for prep school (had an athletic scholarship so wasn’t completely sure), and one for owning another house (when we moved, we didn’t sell our old house immediately and instead rented it out to try to generate some extra revenue.) When we were asked about how we felt about being place in our group, we all agreed that we felt quite comfortable. We brainstormed a few ideas as to why, and we concluded that in general, being middle class is easy because they never really get blamed for anything. It is not uncommon to hear social and economic problems blamed on the rich or poor, while the middle class tends not to get any negative connotations associated with them. However, I think that can be dangerous this might cause the middle class to not think that socio-economic issues are their problem to solve. As mentioned in the Language and Silence excerpt, “the privileged characteristic comes to define the norm.” Before coming to IGP, I was under the impression that my economic status was very average. I wasn’t spoiled, but my family never had to truly struggle financially. This led me to falsely believing that most people don’t struggle that much economically, which I learned is actually a common myth from Class in America (myth …show more content…

This battle is reflected on in The Great Gatsby Curve where it is discussed why the American Dream is becoming less of a reality. I think that this realization has a lot to do with why the people from the “poor” group felt pride; making it to Cornell despite coming from a low-income family is a huge accomplishment and is contrary to what usually

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