Assignment 14: Seeing Poverty through My Wide Angle Lens

This assignment brings me full circle to the name I gave my blog when this course began:  Anna’s Wide Angle Lens.  My goal for this course was to expand my up-close and personal, one-person-at-a-time telephoto lens perspective as a psychology major.  As this course comes to an end, I can see that it has certainly given me a wider perspective on the society-wide forces that influence our lives.  I think I am starting to learn how to use my wide angle lens.

My broadened perspective is especially apparent when I consider the issue of poverty.  Although I attended Minneapolis Public Schools where many students come from families below the poverty line, I never really thought about the social forces, social structure, social institutions and cultural beliefs that underlie poverty in the United States, and, for that matter, the world.  Growing up in a comfortable upper middle class family, I knew that many of my classmates came from families that were poor, but I didn’t really give much thought to why those families might be living in poverty. 

If I thought about it at all, I’m afraid that I mostly believed that perhaps my poor classmates’ parents didn’t work hard enough or lacked the necessary traits or abilities to get out of poverty.  Now I know that my view was based on an individualistic explanation called “competitive individualism” which most our parents taught us from an early age:  Competitive individualism is the cultural view that we are fully responsible for our own economic fates, and anyone can be successful if they just want it badly enough and work hard enough (Newman, p. 324).  In considering my less economically fortunate classmates, I think my view was that if they just studied hard enough, they would get to college, get good jobs, and be done with poverty. This class has made me see that my competitive individualistic view of poverty was simplistic, narrow, and just plain wrong.

After this course, I now see that poverty is primarily a social issue with complex causes, many, if not most, of which are social and are not related to individual effort or abilities. Nearly every chapter of our text provides a sociological perspective on this pervasive issue.  For example:

·    In Chapter 2 we learned about values and that different societies emphasize different values, with success, independence and individual achievement being seen as important values in U.S. society (Newman, p. 32).  We also learned in Chapter 2 that even a value such as privacy differs by social class, with poor families having less privacy than more well-to-do families.  In that same chapter we also learned about the three sociological perspectives on social order, including the conflict perspective that is offered in Chapter 10 as an explanation for the persistence of poverty:  The “economic, political, and educational systems…support the interests of those who control the wealth” (Newman, p. 46).   

·    In Chapter 3 we learned that even the way in which words are defined, especially by governments, can have serious social implications, with the example of how “homelessness” is defined determining eligibility for governmental help.

·    Chapter 5 introduced us to the concept of social class and the way it is linked to socialization and the promotion of values, and that middle class parents are more likely to promote the values of self-direction, independence and curiosity, while working class parents are more likely to emphasize conformity to external authority (Newman, p. 137). 

·    In Chapter 6 we learned that being overweight is likely to be equated with poverty, with a higher percentage of poor children being overweight than non-poor children and fast-food companies targeting poor, inner-city neighborhoods (Newman, p. 162).

·    In Chapter 7 we learned how the economy affects nearly every aspect of family life, and that sustaining a supportive and nurturing family is nearly impossible without adequate income, and that economic hardship stresses a family’s bonds (Newman, p. 204). 

·    In Chapter 8 we learned that according to the conflict perspective, most societies make sure that the offenders that get processed through the criminal justice system are members of the lowest socioeconomic class, with poor people more likely to get arrested, charged, tried, convicted, imprisoned, and even executed than more affluent citizens.

Chapter 10 also really opened my eyes to what Newman calls the “enduring disparities in income and wealth” (Newman, p. 320).  A few days ago, President Obama spoke of a very serious challenge he sees our country facing: the disappearance of the middle class. After doing Assignment 10, I could certainly understand what he was talking about.  When I started “crunching the numbers” I could see how very challenging it is for U.S. families to meet even basic needs on an annual income that didn’t sound so low.  I calculated that my hypothetical family of four would need nearly $60,000 to live in Minneapolis very modestly with no extras of any kind, and the hypothetical parents in my example were working awfully hard to just barely get by!  And they didn't even begin to meet the “official” definition of "poverty" in the United States.  I saw an internet poll last week based on a report that the median family income in the country is about $50,000.  The poll asked people to say whether they thought they could live in their area on that, and over half of the respondents said that they didn’t think they could, yet an annual income of $50,000 probably qualifies as middle class, not poor. 

I now can see the issue of poverty in the United States from different sociological perspectives.  The structural-functionalist perspective is that in our free market economy and competitive individualistic society, poverty plays a necessary institutional role to provide low-wage workers and people to serve in the military, and to legitimize the traditional values of hard work, thrift and honesty (Newman, p. 322-323).  The conflict perspective would say that the rich and politically powerful work together to create or maintain their status at the expense of the middle and lower classes (Newman, p. 302).  I think that this is what President Obama was talking about.  The recent “Occupy Wall Street” movement would seem to agree!  

My new wide angle sociological lens gives me a new perspective on the issue of poverty in the United States which makes me realize that as members of society, we are all responsible for this issue.  At the very least, we need to look through the wide angle lens when we go to the polls to choose our political leaders if we are going to have any chance of solving this issue during our lifetimes.   I think we should be very wary of any politician who blames the individuals who are poor without looking at the societal factors that contribute to their plight.  Like the rest of us, politicians would benefit from having a sociological perspective—a wide-angle lens.

Of course Chapter 10 addressed many aspects of the issue of poverty directly.  Learning about the challenges faced by children growing up in poverty was both sad and enlightening to me.  I can see now that in terms of education, my less fortunate classmates had the social “deck stacked against them” (Newman, p. 315).  The Minneapolis Public Schools have more than their fair share of students in poverty and must devote many resources to trying to help students who face challenges that can interfere with their education such as hunger, food insecurity, homelessness, and moving too often.  It was also enlightening for me to learn that even when children in poverty graduate from high school, most can’t afford to attend college, and those who do have much lower graduation rates than students from more affluent families (Newman, p. 317).  This is another piece of sociological evidence that make individualistic explanations of why people are poor unconvincing.

My new wide angle sociological lens gives me a new perspective on the issue of poverty in the United States which makes me realize that as members of society, we are all responsible for this issue.  At the very least, we need to look through the wide angle lens when we go to the polls to choose our political leaders if we are going to have any chance of solving this issue during our lifetimes.   I think we should be very wary of any politician who blames the individuals who are poor without looking at the societal factors that contribute to their plight.  Like the rest of us, politicians would benefit from having a sociological perspective—a wide-angle lens.

Social Change in 1989 Romania (Chapter 14 Second Post)

A social movement that had a huge impact on my life was the 1989 Revolution in Romania that led to the overthrow and execution of Romania’s brutal dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.  Although I have written about this in several of my posts on this blog, I could not help thinking of this revolution while reading Chapter 14 of our textbook.  Newman even alludes to this revolution in his assertion that unintentional political opportunities can encourage social movements for change (Newman, p. 473).  Newman points to the economic and structural reforms in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and a relaxation of constraints on freedom of expression as factors that encouraged the protest movements that led to the prodemocracy movements in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe (Newman, p. 473).  According to Newman, some sociologists believe that social movements are more likely to arise when social conditions begin to improve than when they are at their worst (Newman, p. 470).  Newman goes so far as to say that “only when the political structure became less repressive could these monumental changes take place” (Newman, p. 473).  Newman also notes that the mass media play an important role in the success of a social movement (Newman, p. 472). 

Although I’ve had a personal interest in Romania’s 1989 Revolution for several years and have done quite a bit of reading about it, I decided to do my own “Micro-Macro Connection” on what life was like for ordinary Romanian people under Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s totalitarian state and what it was like to experience the 1989 Revolution.  I decided to interview the only person I personally know who actually lived in Romania under Ceausescu and experienced the revolution first hand.  I was born in Romania on March 2, 1990, three months after the December 1989 Revolution, and I was adopted by my Minnesota parents, with Lucie’s assistance, when I was 8 months old.  Lucie helped my parents adopt me in 1990, and she moved from Romania to Minnesota in 1991.  She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota today with her American husband and her two daughters.  Not only did Lucie experience life in a totalitarian state, she also personally experienced the December 1989 Revolution that ended Ceausescu’s rule as well as his life.   

To begin, I asked Lucie what life was like for her while Ceausescu was in power.  I asked her to tell me about the good and the bad aspects of living in Romania under his rule.  Lucie said that things were really pretty good for her and her family when she was a young child.  But in the early 1980’s, life got a lot harder for her family and other Romanian people, as there were severe shortages of food and basic consumer goods.  Electricity was limited to certain hours, and lights were turned off.  People could have just one light bulb on at night.  Romania had borrowed money from other countries and needed to sell most of its agricultural production to repay the loans.  That meant that there was not enough food left to feed the Romanians themselves.  Lucie emphasized that all of these events had happened “gradually” over a time of time, not all at once. While life was getting more and more difficult for ordinary Romanians, the state-run television was always showing how well Romania’s agriculture industry was doing.  The television would often show Ceausescu visiting farms. Lucie said that every night there would be a report of the great harvest or the new farm machines or something that related to Romania’s wonderful food production and of “the peasants doing well.”  But, Lucie says, “to this day I do not understand the emphasis on TV on the farm production when there was getting to be less and less food for us to buy in the stores!”  Lucie explained that in Romania under Ceausescu’s Communism, the peasants didn’t own the land.  In her opinion, because of their lack of ownership and interest in the profits, the peasants didn’t work very hard. “It’s just human nature,” Lucie said.    There were scheduled dates to inspect the farms, and then they would air what they found on TV.  So in order to make it look like the farms were doing well, the people around Ceausescu would make sure everything looked great.  Lucie remembers hearing that they would actually paint the grass green to make it look like everything was growing well. They even moved cows around so it would look like whatever farm Ceausescu was visiting had hundreds of cows, even though they were probably the same cows he just saw at the last farm.  The idea was to create the impression that food was plentiful and the harvest was good.  But Lucie said that no one she knew was fooled because there really wasn’t much food for them to buy in the stores.  

During this time there was increasing emphasis on what a great leader Ceausescu was.  Lucie herself even participated in one of these demonstrations that was filmed and shown on television.  The television would show crowds of people smiling and cheering “Long Live Ceausescu!”  But Lucie said that no one actually screamed “Long Live Ceausescu!” at the demonstrations.  Instead, that was recorded and played over speakers.  Lucie said that people like her who were taking part in the demonstrations just talked about “whatever.”  It was expected that you would participate in these pageants and demonstrations, but Lucie didn’t do it much. 

Lucie told about experiencing severe shortages, especially when she was in college, and how she and her family coped with them.  She told of talking to her mother on the telephone from Bucharest, when the call had to be short.  The first thing they would talk about was basic human necessities.  Her mother would tell her to go to the bus station to pick up the soap or laundry detergent or toilet paper she had finally been able to find and buy for her.  Then, if there was any time left on the call, they would get around to things like “I miss you,” and “I love you.”  People who had cars couldn’t drive them except of certain assigned days, and there was lots of rationing and shortages. 

Lucie also talked about how her freedoms changed during Ceausescu’s rule. She said that life for her was good for the first ten years of Ceausescu’s rule (1965-1975). Policies were pretty liberal, and she doesn’t remember feeling under his control. Communism vs. capitalism was not talked about.  But sometime in the mid-1970’s, she thinks, Lucie and her family quite gradually began to notice changes.  Lucie didn’t really watch the news on television very much.  She said that when she did, she learned that you had to learn to “read between the lines.”  There started to be more emphasis on television on what is wrong with capitalism and how great Romania was under Ceausescu.  According to Lucie, starting in the early 1980’s, the television program times decreased and became shorter and shorter until television programming was just two hours a day (8pm-10pm) and “it was nothing anyone would want to watch.”  It was mainly programs dedicated to Ceausescu’s activities and elaborately staged pageants that celebrated his greatness.  There was a huge emphasis on agriculture and farm production.  At the same time, Ceausescu’s picture started appearing on every building and on the street corners.  There were huge pageants staged in stadiums and large parades to celebrate Ceausescu.  With television cut to just a few hours, most of the good television programs Lucie remembers being able to watch from her childhood disappeared.  Bad movies from other Communist countries like North Korea took their place.  At this time, according to Lucie, “nobody” took what was going on in Romania television seriously.  She also said that during this time, she was aware of the Securitate, the brutal Romanian secret police Ceausescu used to maintain his power, but she did not personally know of anyone who “disappeared” because they criticized Ceausescu.  She said people around her sometimes criticized him, but they were careful what they said and who they said it in front of.   

According to Lucie, late in the 1980’s, people started to hear rumors about revolutions going on elsewhere in the Communist world.  Rumors were going around that something was going on in China and that students there had been massacred.  She said that people also heard that East Germans went to the Czech Republic, and thousands left their cars, and people crossed the border into Western Germany.  But none of this was shown on Romanian television.  Lucie remembers hearing about some anti-Ceausescu demonstrations in the western part of Romania in late 1989 which led to the police or army shooting into the crowd.  She said someone received a videotape of these demonstrations that was smuggled into Romania.  She remembers that Ceausescu himself was actually outside of Romania when the first demonstrations happened.  When he returned, he went on television at a big demonstration in Bucharest to discuss communism and its benefits.  This event was carried live on Romanian television.  It surprised Lucie to hear people screaming “Down with Ceausescu!” over the tapes of the usual “Long Live Ceausescu!”  blaring through the amplifiers.   The television cameras actually captured Ceausescu’s look of confusion and fear when he heard the shouts of “Down with Ceausescu!”  On the live television coverage, Lucie said you could also hear shots fired and see Ceausescu and his wife leave quickly by a helicopter from the demonstration.  After Ceausescu and his wife Elena left the demonstration by helicopter, they left Bucharest and went into hiding.  They were found and arrested four days later.   


Nicolae and Eleana Ceausescu awaiting their "trial"

  Lucie said she thinks it was actually rival members of the Communist party who yelled “Down with Ceausescu!” and that the revolution was actually more like a coup d’état.  She thinks that while there were some genuine revolutionaries on the streets, the revolution was really staged mostly by Ceausescu’s rivals rather than being a real uprising of the people of Romania.   When people heard “Down with Ceausescu!” it was sort of a “signal to the country to stand up” as Lucie saw it.  When Lucie heard the gunshots on television, she was scared.  She said she had felt Romania was a safe country under Communism because the police were everywhere.  The gunshots and events of the revolution shocked her.  Lucie said that the events that followed in the next several days were on television all the time.  Actually, the people leading the revolution had managed to take over Ceausescu’s state-run television station.  They broadcast coverage of the army shooting into the crowd and of other violence, but Lucie says it turned out later that at least some of the incidents may have been staged.   


Romanian revolutionaries capture and control the one and only state television channel.



Lucie vividly remembers the events surrounding the revolution and Ceausescu’s execution.  The execution happened after a four-day period when the Romanian public didn’t know where Ceausescus were or what was going on. Although Lucie says that everyone watched the television coverage of the demonstrations and violence during that time, no one was sure what was happening or who was in charge.  Then on December 25, 1989 everyone found out what was happening.  Lucie remembers that as she and her mother were preparing Christmas dinner with the television on, suddenly a well-dressed man appeared to make a formal announcement.  By Lucie’s account, he said, “the trial of Ceausescu Nicolae and Ceausescu Elena for treason, crimes against the state, and blah, blah, blah has been conducted and they have been found guilty and sentenced to death.  The sentence has been carried out.”  Then, Lucie recalls, the television immediately cut to Romanian folk dancing.  Lucie says that she and her mother were stunned, and looked at each other and said, “What did he say?  Did he say the sentence has been carried out?  What does that mean?”  They left their apartment, as did most of their neighbors who were also watching, and everyone asked each other what they had heard and what it meant.  People went into the streets to demonstrate and celebrate, even though there were still some violent incidents happening. 



Romanian revolutionaries cut a hole in the flag to remove the Communist emblem added by Ceausescu



Lucie said that in the days, weeks and months that followed, more and more about the Ceausescus was shown on television, including a videotape of their execution.  At the execution on Christmas day, someone managed to tape the execution, smuggle the tape out of Romania and put it on French television.  From there, it was shown all over the world, and soon it was even shown in Romania.  Before the tape was seen on Romanian television, the “official” story was that it was necessary to carry out the sentence quickly because there was a threat of a terrorist conspiracy.  But when the tape was seen, it didn’t support the terrorism story.  Lucie said that this and other inconsistencies with the official story made her wonder whom to believe and what had really happened.  

I was surprised to learn from Lucie that for Romanians who lived through it, the 1989 Revolution was sort of like their 9/11.  It was a very important shared event that had an enormous significance in everyone’s life.  Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing when they found out about Ceausescu’s execution, as Lucie’s very vivid description of that event shows.  I remember being frightened on 9/11, and I think Lucie’s fears on Christmas Day 1989 were similar to that.  But her fears may have been even more intense because it was not clear that the information she was getting on television that day was reliable.  In the United States we have a free press, lots of points of view, and not just one station that is run by the people in charge of the government.  It must have been very unsettling to go from two hours of Ceausescu propaganda on television one night to all-day-long coverage of a revolution the next day, without knowing exactly who was in charge and whether what you are seeing and hearing is even true.  

I was also surprised to hear Lucie describe the rumors she and her friends and family heard about the fall of Communism in other countries before it happened in Romania.  Of course this kind of news would not have been presented on Ceausescu-controlled television, but it made me think how difficult it must have been not to be able to find out what was going on in the rest of the world because all the information you can get is controlled by the state.  Lucie’s view that the people behind the revolution didn’t want the country to know the details of the revolution was also surprising to me.  People should have a right to know what is going on in their own country. They shouldn’t have had to smuggle in tapes in to learn what is happening to them. That would have scared me too.   I am thankful I live where we have a free press.  I can only imagine what it was like to hear the shocking news on smuggled tapes that your country was in some kind of revolution.

I found very interesting the role of television in the lives of Romanians under Ceausescu’s rule.  Television was used not only for entertainment, but also for state-promoted propaganda. From Lucie’s descriptions of the agricultural reports and propaganda-filled pageants, I learned that Ceausescu used television, a new technology, to promote his own interests and to control his population.  It was interesting that, in Lucie’s view, the people who were behind the revolution and Ceausescu’s execution also used television to help them accomplish it. Television was something the Romanians had in their lives, but because Ceausescu had used it to promote his propaganda and false information for so long, the viewers couldn’t be sure what they were seeing when it showed them the events of the revolution.  Yet the way that the revolution backers used the mass media to try to validate and underscore the scope of the movement is certainly consistent with Newman’s view of the importance of mass media to the success of a social movement (Newman, p. 472).  Imagine how differently this revolution might have occurred if new technologies such as the internet and social media such as Facebook and Twitter had been available to the Romanian revolutionaries, as they were to the recent revolutions in the Arab World!

I felt that Lucie really wanted me to understand that life under Ceausescu was not always bad, and that the decline happened very gradually.  She emphasized this point repeatedly throughout this interview.  When you lose freedoms just a little at a time, and your quality of life slips just a little each day, it is hard to notice and hard to stand up and do something about it.  Lucie’s view differs a bit from Newman’s position that social movements are more likely to arise when social conditions begin to improve than when they are at their worst (Newman, p. 470.  In Lucie’s view, Romania’s 1989 Revolution occurred when conditions there were about at their worst, and there had been no lessening of the repression that characterized Ceausescu’s reign.  It was clear to me that Lucie had given quite a bit of thought to this point since she left Romania.  Lucie said that she still wonders today how Romania got into such a bad place under Ceausescu.  She said she thinks it’s every Romanian’s fault, because no one had the courage to stand up.  She wonders why the people didn’t just get together and say, “No, not today” and just go out and sit on the street together instead of standing in the rationing lines, driving their cars only on their designated day and putting up with their single dim light bulbs.  Lucie said, “Twenty-five million people could have stood up.”  But they didn’t.  

The “Peculiar Politics of Immigration”-- 2011 Style (Chapter 13 Second Post)

Newman says that “immigration is one of the hot-button political issues of our time” and that it is an issue on which liberals and conservatives don’t line up neatly on either side (Newman, p. 419).

Here is a link to a recent discussion of where the current Republican candidates for President stand on this issue:

http://nbcpolitics.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/01/9142545-immigration-trips-up-gop-presidential-contenders

Their positions illustrate Newman’s point quite well.  Immigration is just not an easy issue for politicians.  Just as Newman describes, the current candidates don’t fit neatly into a single box on what to do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States. 

The traditional conservative position is in favor of locking down the borders and deporting everyone who is here illegally.  Interestingly, two of the current Republican candidates, Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, have both proposed immigration policies that are more humane to those who are already here.   In an early debate, Perry said his opponents did not “have a heart” if they didn’t support his position to provide in-state college tuition to children of illegal immigrants who had been here a long time and had grown up in U.S. schools. Gingrich said he supports finding a “humane” way to allow families who are here illegally but have laid down roots here for many years to stay here and not be deported.  Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, however, has taken the more hard-liner position on immigration, saying that he opposes Perry’s college tuition plan for children of illegal immigrants as well as Gingrich’s plan that he describes as “a new doorway to amnesty.”  Yet Romney is somewhat vague about what he would do with the 11 million illegal immigrants who are already here.  Interestingly, Perry and Gingrich are generally considered more conservative than Romney, but on this issue, their political leanings are reversed.



Republican Presidential Candidates Romney, Perry and Gingrich debate immigration policy.

NBC Politics (link above) reports that most conservatives still favor deporting everyone who is here illegally, but as Newman points out, many of these illegal immigrants are the parents of children born in the United States who are U.S. citizens as defined under our Constitution (Newman, p. 440).  Deporting them would cause serious problems for these families as well as result in deporting U.S. citizens. 

Another consideration is that immigrants who are here legally and who have become U.S. citizens can and do vote, and their vote is important to the election chances of any candidate for President. 

This issue is important and it makes for interesting political theater as the candidates try to tiptoe carefully through this political minefield.

Assignment 13: My Immigration Story

I was born in Horezu, Romania, in the foothills of Transylvania, as the fourth child of my Roma parents, Constantine and Iona Dobre .  My birth parents lived in the tiny village of Copechene in a small hut with a dirt floor, no electricity, and no running water.  My father sometimes worked on a large collective farm about 100 miles to the north, and my mother worked tending cows in a field.  The hut was also home to my grandmother Eurika, who was the matriarch of the family, as well as to several other people who were probably my aunts, uncles and cousins.  I never actually lived in that hut, because I was taken directly from the hospital in Horezu where I was born to an orphanage in Rimnicu-Vilcea, about 20 miles away.  That was the only time I was ever outdoors until my adoption about 8 months later. 

The orphanage was one of dozens established under the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, communist dictator of Romania from 1961 until his overthrow and execution on Christmas day, 1990, three months before my birth.  Ceausescu was a greedy, ambitious dictator, who, with his wife Elena, lived in relative luxury while the ordinary people of Romania, like my parents, suffered.  Among the many policies he imposed on the people of Romania, perhaps the worst was a policy that each woman was required to have at least 5 children.  Ceausescu’s goal was to grow Romania’s population and to create more workers so that they could produce more manufactured goods and farm products to sell for export.  Under Ceausescu, Romania had incurred a large national debt, and increased production was needed to pay it off.   The people of Romania suffered greatly under this man’s leadership as they were forced to live under strict food and energy rationing and a police state enforced by a large secret police called the Securitate.  While the populace was starving, the Ceausescus were busy building dozens of palaces, buying luxury cars, limousines and boats and living large.  At the time of his overthrow, Ceausescu was overseeing the finishing touches on his newest residence:  The Palace of the People, one of the largest buildings in the world, then second only to the Pentagon.  My parents’ humble hut made for an interesting contrast. 

Forced to have so many children without the means to provide for them, my parents, like many others, had no options except to abandon their babies to state-run orphanages.  Before the fall of Communism in Romania (and the rest of Eastern Europe) in 1989, the Western world knew nothing of these institutions.  After Ceausescu’s death, the rest of the world found out about Romanian orphanages which housed as many as 300,000 children, from birth to age 14, under utterly terrible conditions.  These institutions were crowded with row upon row of white iron cribs, with peeling paint and few workers, where the children were left to themselves most of the time.  Food was scarce, and the babies were fed mostly a grain-based mush.  Medical care was very primitive by western standards.  Heat and electricity were rationed, so the orphanage was cold, and there were flies on the babies from the open windows.  The children under age one were kept in buildings separate from the older children.  Those who were younger than about 9 months were kept in small bassinets and were wrapped tightly in blankets to keep them from moving around very much.  Older babies were taken upstairs to regular size cribs.  When my adoptive parents found me at age 8 months, I had somehow managed to make the move to the larger living space of a regular sized crib, while my peers were still downstairs in the bassinets. (I am a survivor!) 



Here I am in my orphanage crib, peeling paint and all.



Sometime around their first birthday, the babies who survived their first year in the orphanage were taken to a different orphanage for toddlers.  Actually, there was not much toddling going on there, because the children there were also confined to white iron cribs most of the time.  I never was in this toddler facility because my adoptive parents got me when I was eight months old and brought me home to Minneapolis. 

My adoption in Romania took about three weeks from the time my new parents first met me in my orphanage to time they carried me out of there for good.  My adoption was accomplished with the help of Lucie, a Romanian adoption facilitator and translator to whom I owe so much.  Unlike the adoption process in most countries, Romania’s process when I was adopted didn’t involve having an agency assign a baby to adoptive parents in advance of their arrival.  Instead, my parents were asked to walk through the orphanage in pick out the child they wanted.  I truly was chosen!  My parents say, however, that I picked them, because when they came to my crib, I smiled at them. 

I meet my new mom.



I meet my new dad.

When my parents decided to try to adopt me, a complex process began.  The first hurdle was that my adoptive parents had to locate my birth parents to ask them to come to a court hearing and agree to the adoption.  When Romanian parents turned their children over to the orphanages to be cared for, they didn’t have to sign any papers relinquishing their parental rights.  In my case, the information the orphanage had about my birth parents was recorded on a small piece of adhesive tape stuck to the wall above my crib.  It had my parents’ names and the name of the village in which they lived.  With Lucie’s help, my adoptive parents went to the village, where they were able to find my grandmother, Eurika, who came out of the hut, surrounded by several young women who were probably my aunts, and several young children.  My grandmother said that my mother was at her job tending cows in a field and would not be back until the next day.  She said that my father was about 100 miles north helping with the harvest on a large farm.  My grandmother, who had been an orphan herself, said she wanted me to have a proper home and family and parents who could take care of me.  She said she would help my adoptive parents go to the farm to get my father and to bring my mother to Rimnicu-Vilcea for the court hearing.  The next day my adoptive parents met my birth mother, Iona, when they returned to Copechene to get my birth certificate and other documents at the “Mayor House.”  The following day, my parents returned to Copechene to pick up Eurika who would go with Lucie and my new dad to find Constantine and persuade him to go along with the adoption plan.  Since there wouldn’t be room in the car for both of my adoptive parents, Eurika, and Lucie, my mom stayed behind in Rimnicu-Vilcea.  Luckily, my birth father agreed to leave the farm for two days to travel to Rimnicu-Vilcea for the court proceedings necessary for my adoption, but his boss wouldn’t let him leave his work that day.  George drove my dad, Lucie and Eurika 100 miles back to Rimnicu-Vilcea, then drove back to get Constantine early the next morning to bring him to court.  The next day, my parents and Lucie somehow managed to get everyone to the courthouse in Rimnicu-Vilcea where my birth parents signed the documents necessary to relinquish their parental rights to me.  They both signed with an “x” because they could not read or write.  But I had to remain in the orphanage another week until my adoption could be finalized in Romania.  A half-page report from a social services agency was required, but it was then Wednesday, and the woman who typed these reports would only type them on Tuesdays.  So my parents and Lucie had to wait a week until the final adoption hearing could take place the following Wednesday.  They went to Bucharest to try to get a head start on the U.S. immigration paper work that would be required.  They tell me it was a long week.  In Bucharest, they weren’t able to accomplish much without having the adoption hearing completed, so they did some sightseeing.  They stayed in an apartment that belonged to their driver’s aunt.  It was in one of the many large apartment buildings that Ceausescu ordered built to replace the individual houses which he wanted to eliminate throughout Romania.  The apartment had no water during the morning and most of the afternoon hours, to save energy.  Bathing, laundry and dishwashing all had to occur in the evening hours or early in the morning before the water was turned off.  Street lights were also scarce at night also to save energy.  My parents say it was a pretty bleak place to live.

After a long week in Bucharest, my parents and Lucie traveled about 100 miles back to Rimnicu-Vilcea on the following Tuesday.  When they arrived, they went to the orphanage to make sure I was still there and okay.  They were allowed to take me out of the orphanage for an hour to get my passport picture taken.  That was probably the first time I had been outdoors since arriving at the orphanage as a newborn.  The next day, my parents went to the courthouse for the official adoption hearing.  There were three judges, no less!  They asked many questions about life in Minnesota and about what my status would be under Minnesota adoption law.  My mother, an attorney, says that she was so nervous and excited about the day that she couldn’t answer these basic legal questions, so my father, who isn't a lawyer, just jumped in and started talking, saving the day!  After the adoption hearing was complete, Lucie took my parents to the “Mayor House” to sign some more papers.  Then it was finally time for my parents to go to the orphanage to get me.  It was October 31, 1990, Halloween, in the foothills of Transylvania.  At the orphanage, my brand new parents waited in the Director’s office for the nurse to bring me to them.  They were asked to remove my raggedy and dirty orphanage clothes, which my parents were very happy to do.  They dressed me in my new clothes from Minnesota and then walked out of there with me for keeps.  We celebrate October 31 every year as my Adoption Day, which we also call Gotcha Day. 



Mom and Lucie change me out of my orphanage clothes.





My Dad signs my adoption papers at the "Mayor House" in Rimnicu Vilcea while Lucie looks on.



The driver then drove us all back to Bucharest.  The next day was filled with adoption paperwork at the U.S. Embassy.  My parents tell me that when they arrived at the Embassy, they were directed to a large park across the street which was teeming with hundreds of people.  They were told that it was the line for getting into the Embassy.  Lucie came to the rescue, however, by having my parents show their U.S. passports.  When they did, they were immediately escorted across the street to the Embassy and led to the proper office.  My parents were told that the big crowd in the park was comprised of Romanians who wanted to immigrate to the United States and came there every day to try to be among the lucky few who got visas.  Most were unsuccessful.  Although like these people, I was a Romanian citizen too, my new status as the adopted child of American parents got me to the front of this very long line. 

The Embassy official told my parents that a medical examination by a U.S. Embassy-approved clinic in Bucharest was a requirement for issuing my U.S. visa.  My parents tell me that this examination was a joke.  The doctor listened to my heart for two seconds and tested the reflexes in my legs and said I was fine.  That was it.  There was no medical history, no blood work, or anything else.  The doctor didn’t even fill out the form.  She signed and stamped it and left it to my mother and Lucie to try to fill out the eight pages of detailed medical information in Romanian.  After that my parents remember standing in line for hours at the U.S. Embassy to get all of the necessary papers processed for my visa.  Somewhere along the way I also got a Romanian passport.  Then my parents went to the Lufthansa office to try to get plane tickets out of Bucharest for the next day.  The Lufthansa office was the only place in all of Romania that my parents saw a computer.  All of my adoption and immigration papers were typed on old fashioned typewriters with carbon paper. 

My parents say that they thought they had all the paperwork done so that we could leave Romania the next day, but then discovered at the Lufthansa office that the planned flight back to Minnesota would involve stops in Germany and England.  Germany would not present any problems, but England would require a British visa for me, so my dad had to go to the British Embassy and try to get one.  This was very difficult to do on such short notice, but he somehow managed.  The next day, my parents said goodbye to Lucie, and the driver drove the three of us to the Bucharest airport.  We flew to Frankfurt, Germany that night.  My parents say that when I saw the bright lights and signs at the Frankfurt airport, I was transfixed.  My orphanage existence was so dark and dull, and now I was seeing a whole new world.  It has just begun. We spent the night at an airport hotel in Frankfurt, and flew the next morning to London (where no one ever looked at my British visa), and then to Minneapolis.  I’m told that I slept only during the last 20 minutes of the long flight. 

Many family members and friends of my parents, as well as quite a few strangers welcomed me to my new home, but only after some more immigration paper work at the airport.  My parents joke that it took 20 pounds of paper to adopt 11 pounds of baby from Romania.  We arrived at my new home and my new life on November 3, 1990. 

A few months later, after my parents completed yet another adoption process in the Minnesota courts to make my adoption final in Minnesota, I was still not a U.S. citizen.  I had to be “sworn in” as a United States citizen in a small office in a warehouse building in Bloomington near the airport.  I have a picture of me at about 15 months old waving an American flag in this little office having absolutely no idea what I was doing or why. That was the day I became a U.S. citizen.

My parents tell me that while most people were very supportive of their decision to adopt a Romanian baby, a few suggested that they should have adopted an "American" child instead, showing that prejudice against immigrants can extend even to those of us who were adopted by U.S. citizens when we were tiny babies.  But what, exactly, is that "American child" that my parents supposedly should have adopted instead of me?  Except for the Native Americans, everyone who is here has an immigration story in their family somewhere along the line.   I am glad that my parents didn't listen to the "made in America" argument and instead went to Romania to find me.   I don't understand the position of those who oppose immigration to this country.  I suppose it may be, as Newman suggests, fueled by competition over scarce resouces, fear of outsiders, or even racism (Newman, p. 436).   But if people stopped to think about it, they would have to see that the United States is a land of immigrants.  Although the decision to leave Romania and come to the United States wasn't mine, I am proud and happy to join the long line of immigrants to this country. 

Prejudice against Black Pets? (Extra Post for Chapter 11)

In case you haven’t heard everything yet, here is a link to a news report that an animal shelter in Hastings, MN planned to hold a “Black Friday” sale on black-furred pets: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45446104/ns/local_news-minneapolis_st_paul_mn/

The shelter said that they noticed that people tended to adopt animals that have colors other than black. 

Is this an extension of personal racism carrying over into even to household pet choices?  From a symbolic interactionism perspective, could it be that the connotations of the words “black” and “white” that Newman discusses carry over even to household pets?  Newman says dictionary definitions of “black” include “soiled and dirty, thoroughly evil, wicked, gloomy, marked by disaster, hostile and disgraceful” (Newman, p. 360).  To this, the animal shelter spokesperson added “plain” and “associated with witchcraft and Halloween.”

I did an internet search to find out if other animal shelters were also having trouble getting their black pets adopted, and found out that this is a common phenomenon.  I also found this article which reports that a NAACP official saw racial overtones in holding a “black pets only” adoption event being held by a Norfolk, VA pet shelter.

http://hamptonroads.com/2009/11/some-see-racial-overtones-norfolks-petadoption-event

Who wouldn’t want one of these beautiful pets?

Gender Inequality in Families: Women as the Cooking Apes (Second Chapter 12 post)

On a recent visit home, I watched a scene I have observed so many times before at mealtime.  After my family returned from an outing together (shopping, movie, etc.), my dad retired to the den to watch football or to do something on his computer while my mom automatically began preparing the evening meal.  There is never a discussion of who will prepare the food:  it is always my mom (with or without some help from me).  That’s just how it is.  I never really thought about it before, but in a strange coincidence, at the same time we read Chapter 12 on Sex and Gender inequality for Sociology, I also read a book related to the Human Evolution class I am also taking.  The book Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire:  How Cooking Made Us Human.  In it, Wrangham sets forth his “cooking hypothesis” which stems from the idea that the control of fire and the cooking of food is what lead to the evolution of the modern human, both in terms of changes in the human body that were made possible by eating cooked foods (such as bigger brains), and changes in our behavior including the sexual division of labor and development of pair bonds.

Wrangham presents loads of evidence that suggests that man became “the cooking ape” beginning as early as the transformation from Homo habilis to Homo erectus beginning about 1.8 million years ago.  From a sociological standpoint, however, it is the behavioral changes this made possible that are most interesting.  After reading this book, I think that Wrangham should have said instead that “woman became the cooking ape.”

According to Wrangham, the harnessing of fire and the ability to cook led to the evolution of the sexual division of labor and pair bonding.  Once cooking reduced the amount of time necessary for chewing raw meat and tough plants, there was more time for hunting and gathering, which created the division of labor.  The male hunted while the female stayed behind to gather and cook.  Even if the hunt was not successful, the ability to eat cooking-softened gathered food would allow everyone to consume enough calories, but this depended on those staying behind to gather and cook other food, such as tubers and roots.  Cooked food plus more animal foods as a result of more hunting time (and less chewing time) created a division of labor.  Wrangham says that pair bonding was a natural outgrowth of this, because it solves the problem of who feeds whom:  The female stays behind and cooks and gathers while the males hunt.  The male protected the female from having someone stronger steal the food they have piled up waiting to be cooked, and in turn, the female provided a meal every night for their partner.  In other words, Wrangham’s idea is that pair bonding evolved in response not to mating competition but to competition for food. If the hunting was successful, the pair bond would share the food.  And thus it all began.

Interestingly, in the following quote, Wrangham acknowledges that this division of labor did not work out so well for the females in the long run:

The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony.  Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits.  But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority.  Men were the greater beneficiaries.  Cooking freed women’s time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture.  Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority.  It is not a pretty picture.  (Wrangham, p. 177)

Wrangham goes on to devote an entire richly documented chapter to showing how the woman as the cooking ape model in a pair bond is nearly universal across time and place in most cultures since cooking began.  He observes that “while the arrangement is comfortable for both sexes, it is particularly convenient for the male” (Wrangham, p. 147). Newman says that “much of the inequality women face revolves around the traditional view of their family role” (Newman, p. 400).  It seems that role developed very early on, even before we became Homo sapiens, which makes changing this very “powerful and persuasive” aspect of  our sexist ideology a tall order indeed (Newman, p. 402).

Assignment 12: Using Science To Promote Sexism in Athletics

For a class I took last summer, I listened to a lecture Dr. Barbara Drinkwater presented in May 2009 to the American College of Sports Medicine entitled “The Evolution of the Female Athlete:  Myth versus Reality.”  This lecture details how “science” has been used, mostly by men, to keep women from pursuing and achieving their goals in the field of athletics.  It is a great example of sexism in our sports-crazed culture.  From a conflict perspective, it seems that men have dominated the sports world and have viewed the role of women in it as adoring spectators rather than as participants.  Attempts of women to break into this world have been thwarted by men using “scientific” reasons to prevent or discourage them, which are cloaked in the rubric of the structural functionalist:  that bodily differences explain gender inequality in sports, and keeping women off the courts and playing fields (at least at the highest levels) will effectively maintain societal stability by protecting their wombs for reproduction of the species.

(Note:  Although this lecture was once online, I couldn’t find a link to it to post here.  Luckily, I took quite a few notes while listening to this thought-provoking lecture, and this post is based on those notes.)

In her lecture, Dr. Drinkwater traced the modern history of women in sports, beginning in the late 1800s, focusing on myths versus realities, addressing three questions:  What obstacles did women face in their quest to become athletes?  Who helped them? Who hindered them?  In looking at these questions, Dr. Drinkwater demonstrated many ways in which “science” actually got in the way of the development of the athletic capabilities of a whole group of athletes, in this case women.  In most cases, scientific-sounding pronouncements that were just plain wrong were used to promote prejudice and discrimination against women who wanted to be athletes.  Here are some examples:

In the late 1800s, the social environment was not very hospitable to women.  In 1879, for example, a noted social psychologist, Gustave LeBon, wrote that women’s inferior intelligence is too obvious to be disputed, and women’s brains are closer to gorilla brains than to men’s brains.  A medical doctor of the time wrote that the average woman is “rather less intelligent” than man.  These “scientific-sounding” pronouncements must have been wrong, because in 1902, Marie Curie somehow managed to win the Nobel Prize in Physics with her supposedly inferior female brain.  In sports, in 1882, Maude Watson won the first women’s tennis singles title at Wimbledon, in the same year that a Florida newspaper reported that the articulation of the radius and ulna is imperfect in women, so that when the racquet hits the ball, it tends to knock it high in the air.  That article went on to pronounce that it was a “scientific fact that tennis is not a game for the human female.”  I wonder what Venus and Serena Williams would make of that?

 Other“scientific” pronouncements about the capabilities of women concerned the effect of intellectual activity on the female uterus.  In 1873, for example, a statement by a prominent professor at Harvard Medical School asserted that the rigors of higher education actually diverted blood from the woman’s uterus to her brain, making her irritable and infertile.  This kind of over-concern for the women’s uterus is a theme that continues even to this day with regard to females in athletics. 

Despite the efforts of male scientists to discourage them, however, women somehow managed to participate in sports in the late 1880s.  The first women’s lacrosse game was in 1886, and the first women’s tennis championship (France) was in 1887.  In 1888, the modern bicycle was invented, and Amelia Bloomer invented bloomers so that women could ride it.  Susan B. Anthony wrote in 1896 that bicycling did more to emancipate women than anything else because it gave women the feeling of freedom and self-reliance.  The invention of bloomers also allowed women to play baseball, first on bloomer girl baseball teams, and later just wearing what the men wore.  In 1896, women played basketball too, wearing those bloomers, in the first intercollegiate game between University of California Berkley and Stanford.

Despite this good start for intercollegiate competition for women, it was stifled with the help of “medical opinions” that focused on concerns with infertility effects of physical exertion, as well as “medical” assertions that if women competed in sports, they would somehow turn into men.  Other “scientific” evidence of the time asserted that women could not play strenuous sports because they breathed differently than men.  This idea was debunked by a female doctor in 1910 who pointed out that the constrictive clothing women wore when trying to compete in sports (such as whalebone corsets) is what caused women to breathe differently than the men when they were exerting themselves.

Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, was openly hostile to participation by women in the Olympic Games.  In 1914 he said that participation in the Games by women would be impractical, uninteresting, and improper.  He limited their participation to just the floor exercises and required them to wear long skirts.  A few years later, Suzanne Lenglen won the French Open tennis championship in 1920 wearing a then-scandalous knee-length skirt and a sleeveless blouse, and in doing so, became the first female celebrity athlete.  It could be said that this is where the objectification of women in sports began.  Most female professional tennis players wear shorts, not skirts, for practice, and only wear the skirts and dresses in tournaments to please their sponsors.  The sponsors, of course, like their female tennis players dressed in the short skirts and skimpy dresses that appeal to the male audiences!  Talk about objectification!  As a tennis friend of mine once noted, if skirts really helped you play better tennis, don't you think men would have figured out a way by now to wear them too?

In the early 1900s, women wanted to compete in track and field as well in the so-called female sports, but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) turned them down.  A few French women decided to form their own international organization and put on the first international track and field competition for women.  Thousands watched it, leading the IOC to reconsider and allow women to have five track and field events in the 1928 Olympics.  Unfortunately, six of the nine runners in this distance event collapsed, leading to the conclusion that women were incapable of running this distance. Doctors of the time gave their "considered medial opinions" that women could not be endurance runners, and that distance running made women become "old too soon."  This myth persisted for over 30 years, and it was not until the 1960 Olympic Games that women were allowed to run races longer than 200 meters.

The 1920’s brought a return to the infertility theme, when a 1936 article in the Scientific American asserted that feminine muscular development interferes with motherhood.  There was absolutely no scientific research on women athletes to back this up, and almost no research of any kind was done on female athletes until the 1960s. 

Although the 1970’s were what Dr. Drinkwater called the golden era of female athletes with the passage of Title IX and Billie Jean King’s 1973 trouncing of Bobby Riggs, a 50-year-old man who bragged that he could beat any woman in tennis.  After King's resounding victory, a 1974 Sports Illustrated article acknowledged that the inequalities imposed on women in sport have been justified by misconceptions of the physiological differences, real or imagined, between the sexes. 

One such misconception, however, popped up in 1978, when a Chicago newspaper cited a gynecologist’s opinion that women should not engage in jogging because their uteruses can’t take the repeated impact caused by heels striking the ground.  It turned out that this doctor’s opinion was based on a sample of one!  Later that year, Little League Baseball banned girls and said in 1974 that girls can’t throw overhand because of differences in the structure of their pectoral muscles, and when they do throw overhand, it results in a lob.  Another doctor contradicted this, however, by pointing out that if girls throw differently, it is because they have not had the training, experience and practice that the boys have had.  This same doctor bravely noted that Little League Baseball had promoted a doctrine of male superiority that has no scientific basis in fact.  Little League Baseball stuck to its no-girls policy until the National Organization for Women filed suit against it and won in 1974.

In the 1980’s, a growing body of scientific research done of female athletes finally began to appear and showed that there was basically no difference between male and female athletes when training, conditioning and acclimatization are the same for both sexes.  Imagine that!

Dr. Drinkwater ended her lecture by noting that women athletes today owe a debt of gratitude not to the scientists and doctors, but to the brave women athletes who went ahead and followed their dreams despite all of the “scientific” noise to the contrary.  It was interesting to me to learn about the role that “science” and “medicine” have played to keep women from pursuing athletic endeavors.  It is important to remember the scientific-sounding pronouncements can so unquestioningly be used by those who want to promote a certain social agenda.  We all need to be reminded to look critically and carefully when “scientific” and “medical” claims are made to support exclusionary positions or decisions that seek to limit what certain groups can and cannot, or should or should not do.  A current example from professional tennis is a case in point.  In many tournaments, women still earn less prize money, and this is justified by the fact that their matches are the best of three sets, while the men's are best of five.  The idea that women tennis players are somehow physically incapable of going the distance in a five set match is ludicrous, yet that is the "scientific" reason given for the difference.  For this and other questions, we need to ask what evidence supports the proposition; do the best we can to determine the credibility of that evidence, and to look for and evaluate any evidence that may support a contrary position.  There steps were not followed in the cases of questionable science and medicine used to keep female athletes from pursuing their goals, as Dr. Drinkwater described.  I think this same caution applies not just to question involving athletic endeavors, but to activities in other spheres as well!