Oranges, The Great Migration, and Social Stories:
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
In the first week of this class we focused our attention on underscoring what exactly it is that Sociologists do. Do we study people? Yes, but to leave it there is an oversimplification. What exactly is it that we study about people? Are people made of water? Yes, but that’s not what Sociologists study. Do we study whether people have access to water? Yes! Because access to water emerges from how people are organized in a given time and space. Thus, when we study society, what we are studying is how people in a given geographic and historical location make decisions about how they are organized.
See, the thing is, we always exist in relation to each other. Whether friends or strangers, our lives are interdependent. This is a theme of the course, and something that we will talk about, in various ways, each week. It’s why I talked about the idea of a string: who and what makes it possible for me to eat an orange? The string helps us to see the connections outside our personal lives, and into the lives of strangers locally and globally.
Roads must be built, and they are built by people and designed by people and repaired by people; they must also be funded, usually through the tax base, but also sometimes through international loans. So, to study people and our cultural patterns (such as when and how we eat oranges), is also to study more complex aspects of how we go about getting things done. People are involved, but so are governments, and social policies. In other words, we study how people are organized.
The orange is a symbol in this lesson. But it is more than that: we eat them only because of how we organize the food system. Let’s face it: we live in Illinois and oranges don’t grow here. It’s not random that we eat oranges; it’s organized so as to make it possible. As a symbol, the orange represents social policies like Jim Crow segregation and the violence that maintained that system. That is why George Swanson Starling migrated from Florida to New York. He picked oranges — which is something that must happen in order for me to eat an orange — but he fled because of the racist policies that shaped his experience.
How do I know this about Mr. Starling’s experience? Because of the empirical evidence produced by scholars, such as Isabel Wilkerson.
Her book is grounded in historical evidence, including interviews with living migrants and their relatives, as well as analysis of secondary data, such as census reports. No matter my personal opinion about the book (e.g. I like it, or I don’t. It’s too long. I love her writing style. It’s brilliant. It’s boring), the evidence remains the evidence. I’ve read the book, and I think her writing is fantastic. But no matter what I think, no matter my opinion, those racist policies existed, and millions of people, including Mr. Starling, fled North with hope of a different, and safe life.
So, as Sociologists, we study people, like Mr. Starling, but also the policies and institutions that shape how we as people have been and are organized. We will explore how this organization changes over time and across geographic space, and we will ask crucial questions about collective well-being, and the extent to which social organization is keeping us safe and healthy.
Happy learning. Stay curious. Stay safe! Dr. Monica
