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“Don’t Be All, Like, Uncool” (The Self)
Seven strangers are sitting around a table, making introductions.
Heather explains that she went to an all-Black high school. “Maybe…” She pauses and adds, “No, it was just a Black high school.” The others laugh. “You know, I can’t even say, ‘Maybe [one white person].’ It was just a Black high school.”
Eric’s neighborhood, on the other hand, was populated with white middle- and upper-class families. “But then you can go jog like two miles and you get into Asbury Park. And that’s like predominantly Black.”
“I was way out in the country,” Becky explains. “This was, like, as white as can be—one culture there.”
Kevin’s eyes widen at the “one culture” comment.
There’s no better place to start exploring what reality TV teaches us about ourselves than the premiere episode1 of The Real World. First airing on MTV in 1992, as explained in its original opening sequence, the show is “the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a loft and have their lives taped.” Not only was The Real World arguably the “first” reality show, but it also shows us, very clearly, what it means to think sociologically.
At its core, sociology is concerned with understanding collective human experience. It is the study of how we do things in groups, how those groups work, and how they change over time. But that doesn’t mean we neglect the individual; the discipline has always explored the tricky tango between our individual selves and the social contexts that shape, and are shaped by, them. One classic sociological topic, for instance, has been unemployment—which is at once a personal issue and a collective problem, subject to broad cultural and economic patterns.2
Widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) promoted the idea that our lives are shaped by social forces, which can be analyzed in a systematic, scientific way. Durkheim broke with existing fields (such as psychology) that had focused on individual experience, as well as fields (such as philosophy) that had analyzed the social world from a more humanistic perspective. In his bid to legitimate sociology as a discipline, he drew comparisons to the more established, “hard” sciences—arguing, for instance, that we can study the different elements of society in the same way that a biologist might examine the components of a cell. Not only was society a worthy object of study, Durkheim claimed, but by investigating it, we could extract quantifiable truths and make future predictions.
Society, Durkheim contended, isn’t simply a collection of individuals; rather, it is its own entity and demands its own analysis. Specifically, our lives are governed by “social facts,” which “consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.”3 If suicide, for instance, were just about the individual decision to commit the act, that wouldn’t explain why suicide rates vary among countries or why they change within a country as characteristics of the economy change.4
Further ruminating on the relationship between the individual and broader society, the modern sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) defined what he called the “sociological imagination” as “the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self—and to see the relations between the two.”5 Both Durkheim and Mills, in slightly different ways, were concerned with a core sociological issue: How can we understand our own lives as a part of something larger?
“We’re all influenced by our social environments” may not seem like a revolutionary premise, but in Durkheim’s time, Mills’s time, and even today, many of us scarcely realize the extent to which this is true. Often when we have troubles in our lives, Mills wrote, we lack a sociological imagination. We tend to see things as the result of individual failures rather than as the products of large-scale sociohistorical forces. To be clear, this imagination doesn’t absolve people from making bad choices, but it demonstrates how we always make those choices within particular social constraints. Going back to unemployment, for instance, it’s objectively true that I lost my high school job as a bank teller because I was slow and unmotivated. But it’s also objectively true that the economy was tanking and the branch needed to fire someone. As the newest, youngest, and worst employee, I was the lowest-hanging fruit.
At first blush, reality TV might seem like an inapt candidate to teach us about the social forces that influence our lives. In some ways, the genre is hyperfocused on the individual, showcasing humans with interesting traits or quirks (drag queens! celebrities! people who eat their couches!) and underscoring the importance of personal responsibility.6 Yet reality programs also expose how these personalities are cultivated within the patches of social life they happen to inhabit. When diverse individuals socialized in different ways come into contact, sparks may fly, illuminating the fact that our understandings of the world are learned rather than innate.
WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD
Magnification of social difference is at the heart of The Real World. The first season’s cast members were all in their late teens to mid-twenties and individually compelling in some way. You may remember Julie, who, attempting to break free from her southern conservative upbringing, rode on the back of a stranger’s motorcycle and spent time with the homeless. Heather (aka “Heather B.”) had already established a career as part of a rap group and was trying to make it as a solo artist. Becky and Andre were also musicians. Eric was a model. Kevin was a poet. Norman, the token queer character (and the first of many on that series), was a painter and gave his testimonials in a bathtub for no apparent reason.
Though The Real World is ostensibly about these unique individuals, it’s fairly easy to view it with a sociological imagination, because the show does much of the work for us. Julie’s fish-out-of-water trajectory highlights how, despite her zeal for exploration, her upbringing has in many ways molded her outlook on the world. In one iconic scene, Heather’s beeper goes off, and Julie asks whether Heather sells drugs. While the comment is punctuated by a dramatic guitar riff, nobody on the show calls it out as racist. In fact, Kevin, who is also Black, tells the cameras that Julie seems “very open.”
But in another scene, race is the explicit topic of dinnertime conversation, when Kevin comments that racism “is alive and well.” He goes on to discuss his experience with the n-word and people’s assumption that he’s good at basketball, while Heather describes how she’s treated like a potential shoplifter when she visits stores. It’s not a stretch to understand how collective, historical understandings of race and gender have impacted these three housemates’ perceptions of and interactions with the world. And if we can’t make that leap ourselves, Kevin, Heather, and Julie help us over the hurdle, by explicitly pointing out that the US has a shared history that disparately impacts members of its various groups. “At some point in my life,” Kevin says, “I recognized that a large part of my history was denied from me.”
“Your history is my history,” Julie objects.
“I agree,” says Kevin. “You just don’t realize it.”
Copyright © 2022 by Danielle J. Lindemann