Question

Compare and contrast how Durkheim and Baldwin think about social norms. What if the norms contain what in class we called a "double bind"? That is: what if (as Baldwin says) to be included, one must make the "white categories” as one’s own?

 

 

Answer 1

According to Durkheim, the term social facts is used frequently to designate almost every phenomenon that happens within society despite presenting little social interests of some generality. Usually, every society, there are highly determined groups of phenomena separable due to their distinct features from the others that make up the subject matter of other sciences of nature. Durkheim claims that there are various ways of acting, feeling, and thinking that possess the remarkable property of existing outside the consciousness of the person. Indeed, there is no social fact that may exist unless it is associated with a well-defined social organization (Durkheim, 1938, p3). However, there are some of the social facts that can never avail themselves of an already crystallized form but may possess similar objectivity and ascendancy over the person.

 

Durkheim justifies his definition of social facts by urging for prompt verification through an examination of an experience that is characteristic. For instance, it is sufficient to see how children are brought up. Perhaps, all education comprises of a continual effort to improve a child's way of seeing, thinking, and feeling if one observes the facts as they are and as they have been often. The social facts are identifiable through the force of external coercion that it exerts in people. On the other hand, Durkheim believes that suicide neither happens at any age nor occurs at all ages of life with similar frequency. The capacity of social facts for expansion is never the cause but rather the effect of its sociological character.

 

According to Baldwin in his book ‘Notesof a Native Son,' he discusses the concept of social norms in numerous ways. He believes that people who stay in one particular region form a society. He lived in the part of New York called Harlem until his adult years, where the neighborhood was inhabited predominantly by black people. When Baldwin moved away from home, he came to realize that the social beliefs of his father were true. At one point in his life, he had to deal with prejudice and the impacts of Jim Crow laws, which required certain behaviors from African Americans when dealing with white people. Generally, Baldwin learns that he must be able to balance the acceptance of social life with the basic idea of equal power. Baldwin found it so hard to attend his father's funeral since he had nothing black to wear as per the social norms of society (Baldwin, 1984, p24). He was forced to spend most of the time in the downtown apartment with one of his friends celebrating his birthday.

 

In ‘Stranger in the Village’, Baldwin visits an isolated village in Switzerland where he stays with a friend. The friend forewarns him that the villagers have never seen a black man before. He did not believe his wordings until he saw the reactions of the villagers and hears children call him ‘Niger!’ (Baldwin, 1984, p36). He realizes that people were looking at him in a different way since Black men are perceived to be former slaves.