What make somebody deviant in society? Is it the way they look? How they act? Where they come from? The answer to this question is actually simply that deviance depends on perception.
If you are viewed by anybody else to be deviant, then you are. The example we used in class was from an episode of Seinfeld. In the episode, Jerry was scratching the side of his nose, but his girlfriend, from her perspective, thought he was picking his nose. Was Jerry being deviant? Yes. Since his girlfriend perceived him to be deviant, he was. In class, we did a reading called Saints and Roughnecks. In this experiment, a sociologist spend over a year observing two groups of male students at the same high school, and tried to determine which was more deviant. The group called the Saints-the preppy, white, wealthy, super involved, good students-were always described by teachers and parents as very good kids. Oppositely, the Roughnecks-poor, minority, poorly dressed, disinterested in school, below average students-were always described as troublemakers, as lazy and lacking drive or potential. In reality, both of the gangs of boys were fairly equally deviant, the Saints being a little more so than the Roughnecks. Both groups of boys drank, vandalized public property, stole, and caused general mayhem, but since the Roughnecks had the appearance of being deviant, they were the group that was always perceived to be that way.
At my own school, I find that a majority of the school is Saints. Being an affluent high school in the suburbs, the students that fit the appearance of deviance are few and far between. Almost all of the students that are deviants are Saints-they appear to be good kids, and do their deviant activity behind closed doors.
Another concept we discussed in class was social class, and how it affects people in America. We defined social class to be a ranking measured by someones income, their wealth, their level of education, as well has some other factors. The higher level someone has of these traits, the higher social class they belong to. Social classes range from the bottom level impoverished, to the top rung, elite capitalists. In America, we don't like to think of ourselves as a culture with a social hierarchy, but in reality, ours is one of the most skewed in the world. The levels of income in our country range from those making less than $10,000.00 a year, to the top 1%, making over $500,000.00 annually. In our country, the top 50% of Americans own over 98% of the wealth.
To demonstrate the realities of the income bracket in America, we played a game of monopoly, where one player played as the old-money capitalist, starting with over $3,000.00 and owning several of the properties, and another player played as the working poor, starting with about $100.00 and no properties, and the rest of the players ranked within that range. By the end of the game, it was impossible for anyone to come close to catching the capitalist, who ended up over doubling their wealth, and the working poor usually ended up in bankruptcy within a few minutes of starting the game. This game was able to illustrate the fundamental ideas within the American social class system, where those with money can just keep making money, and those without continually struggle.
We also looked at how certain aspects of one's social class can affect generations after them. One of these factors was of education. If a child is brought up in a house where one or both parents has a bachelor degree, or higher, that child is much more likely to go to and graduate from college, since there was an emphasis on education in the household. On the other side of the spectrum, a child in a home where both parents never finished high school and both work in minimum-wage, manual labor jobs, that child is very likely to also never finish high school, since college is almost a financial impossibility, and there was most likely little to no emphasis on the importance of education in their home.
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