First Week of Class – Reaction to Class Activity

One activity that I appreciated the first week of class was when we each wrote down our different social identities on note cards, mixed up the cards and redistributed them, and then had to say why or why not we thought the card we each received would be in our in-group or out-group. I found this interesting because it made me think about how arbitrary these social identities such as religion, sexual orientation, and disability status in showing how compatible people could be and what values they have in common.

The card I received in front of me had all of the same social identities as my own (age, disability status, religion, ethnicity and race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, indigenous status, and national identity) except that this person was one year older than me. However, there is no one in this class who I am already close friends with. I realized that despite all these similarities, I would not necessarily consider this person part of my in-group based on this information. Despite all the social identities that I had in common with this anonymous near-stranger I had no reason to think that we would have similar values, morals, lifestyles, or even senses of humor. My best friend at school has almost all different social identities than mine. That is because it is not these things that make us part of the same in-group. Although we have extremely different backgrounds, we actually probably have more to talk about and more values in common, than whosever card this way.