Social Construction of RealityHow is their reality in the neighborhood socially constructed? What are the unwritten rules that govern how you can or can’t act? How do you think this construction came about? Can you see their racist attitudes as a social construction?
The concept behind this area is that your in the center of it our your outside fearing it.
The first part of where you see this is Sonny. He is the center of everything and everyone around him fears of what he is capable of just like C’s father said.
The second part you see this is with C’s friends. The center of the situation is their violence with the black people we see throughout the movie. C was on the outskirts fearing it. You can clearly see his fear when he is in the car with the boys going to commit a hate crime.
The rule with these two groups is that you let it be no matter how bad their actions are because you don’t want to face any consequences for standing up. This happens the same way when C doesn’t rat on Sonny when he shot the man when he was younger.
This may be a stretch on how this started, but, I will state it any way. I feel like when the Italian population first came about, everyone was equal since everyone started at the bottom. Someone didn’t like that idea so they gained power by putting fear into everyone creating power. This power must have been inherited to Sonny from who knows. I think it comes from humans always wanting to be the best and because not everyone can be the best, people get left behind. This also gets me to the racist ideas that maybe they want to do this because coming to America as foreigners, they are not high with social status so maybe looking down on black people is a way to raise up their status. Basically a social food chain. This same thing happens with the Italians because the real mobsters like Sonny are top and the younger guys like C’s friends want to be like that so they do bad things on purpose to make them seem more bad ass. Sonny is smart enough to know how stupid they are.
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You're on to something here with the immigrants on the bottom. I think the dynamics with the Italian immigrants are important to the story even though we don't see them. These immigrants came to America hoping to make money, and what they found was a difficult life in an ethnic ghetto. There was not a lot of government help, i.e. police protection and etc. They filled these gaps with some illegal means such as the mob providing stability and control, and the illegal activities providing economic opportunity that might not be available otherwise.
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