¶ … overweight adolescents. How do socioeconomic resources matter for adolescent weight? How do schools influence adolescent's weight gain? How does poverty shape the weight-related structural features of schools? The resources matter because resources must be expended to counteract the bad influences and lack of guidance that is going on when it comes to overweight children. Indeed, unless the child in question has a glandular or other health issue, the fact that the child is overweight is surely linked to poverty, the environment the child is raised in or a combination of the two. Breaking that pattern is about teaching the child good habits and the parents really have to be involved as well as they are the ones that select and purchase the food most of the time. That being said, schools can only do so much if the child is in poverty as the less healthy foods also happen to be the less expensive ones. Beyond that, schools are often guilty of putting soda and snack machines and/or not offering the best lunch options in the cafeteria. In short, schools have to follow a proper structure and healthy foods need to be made more cost-effective (or they need to be subsidized) so that children learn better habits that they can actually keep given the resources they have available to them.

2) Now think about the employment article with the link provided below. How would you feel if you were Jose? Would you have thought about trying to call yourself "Joe?" What did the study authors find? How does this reinforce stratification in the United States?

Link to article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/jose-joe-job-discrimination_n_5753880.html?

It would be demoralizing and dejecting to be in Jose's shoes. The author of this response would wretch at the idea of changing the name on the application as a means to get by racist or bigoted HR staff. Indeed, if an HR rep or manager would do that in the first place, that is obviously not a company that the author would want to work for given their shoddy and illegal hiring practices. Latinos and other minorities tend to be poorer as it is and not interviewing or hiring people based on the name of the applicants just enforces that stratification.

3) Recall the Money on the Mind video (link provided below) that discussed the Social Psychology experiments at Berkeley. How would you feel if you had been a rich participant in the Monopoly study and found out that you behaved exactly like the other rich participants did? Apply this experiment to real life. What do the results tell us about why people behave the way they do in regards to money? What should we do with the knowledge we've gained from these experiments?

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc

If I acted just like the other rich people, I would be a little taken aback but it would make sense to me in the long run. To have that feeling despite having the deck stacked sharply in my favor would be off-putting to many ... and it should be. In actuality, I would not feel that way but it would seem that this is a pattern that does exist. The study basically says that being "rich" in any sense of the word creates entitlement and arrogance.

1) Some people say that with the election of Barak Obama we have moved onto a post-racial society. In a respectful manner please explain why you think that this is true or untrue.

Absolutely not. Indeed, one easy way to prove this is that many people, often with no proof or evidence, will suggest that criticism of Obama is racially motivated. To be sure, there are absolutely bigots in the United States and this has not changed even with the election of Obama. Race is certainly less of an issue than it was. However, it is still absolutely present as a factor and it will be for some time. Much the same thing could be said if Hillary Clinton is elected as President. Many will say that the glass ceiling no longer exists and that women have "arrived" to the seat of power. However, this will absolutely not be true and many people will accuse critics of Hillary as being misogynist. It's the same cycle. Hillary being elected would be good for women but it is not an end-all of the sexism problems that exist.

2) A lot of people have a hard time seeing beyond the veil. Why do you think we have such a hard time looking beyond our own racial/ethnic identities?

However, anyone with any perspective or insight can see that the playing field is often stacked against minorities. The Jose/Joe thing mentioned earlier is but one example of this. Hearing about a struggle is one thing but living through it is quite another. Even worse, some people that hear about struggles laugh it off and scoff when there is absolutely validity to what is being said.
3) In the video they describe the term of white ethnics and how they were thought to be biologically different, but today these white ethnics are now thought of as part of the white race. Why do you think that these white ethnics were absorbed into the general white group, but other ethnic groups were not?

It is just another way in which people are labeled, stratified and otherwise described. In a similar way, something very similar happens with black people. Indeed, many blacks came from Africa as a result of the slave trade but there are blacks that come straight from Africa in modern times or they come from other countries like Haiti and other Latin America/Caribbean countries. There is also the example of how there are supposed "tiers" to the Asian ethnicities. Many people hold that Chinese and Japanese people are in the upper "echelon" while other Asian cultures (e.g. Filipino, Vietnamese etc.) are lower. In short, white ethnicities are grouped or not grouped based on societal norms or even bigotry.

1) Some Colleges now have a gender neutral bathroom where any student can use, regardless of gender identity. Do you think that this bathroom was installed for the benefit of the trans community or for the benefit of the cisgender community?

To be honest, it is a "safe" way to diffuse the bathroom bomb that is going off around the world. Rather than demarcating bathrooms by gender, gender neutral bathrooms are benig used as a fix-all to solve the debate. The reason this could (or perhaps should) be seen as a cop-out is that many hold that not allowing people to choose the bathroom of their gender identity is bigotry. The other side would hold that biological gender is the determinant. Rather than try to solve the debate, the gender-neutral bathrooms are just a way to avoid the debate. It is the easiest and perhaps best short-term solution but it does kick the proverbial can down the road.

2) The media goes over several issues of doing gender. One aspect the media covers goes over athletics and whether trans men and women can compete as their chosen gender and not as their biological sex. Several competitions have allowed this as long as they meet certain criteria. One of these criteria is that athletes competing as women must not exceed a certain testosterone level. Recently a young Indian woman was excluded from Olympic tryouts for exceeding these limits despite being a biological female. How do we begin to understand gender when introduced to these biological issues?

A major roadblock when it comes to gender and sports, beyond the testosterone issue, is the fact that men tend to be more muscular, lean and taller than women. As such, this would indicate to many that men have an inherent advantage. There are exceptions, but women and men compete separately and the men usually have the better speed and power records. Of course, gender identity and sexual orientation is what it is but so is biology. Bruce Jenner is now Caitlyn Jenner but this does not change the fact that she was born biologically a male and thus she has physical features and traits that women often do not have. One can use a more extreme example and suggest if current/prior MMA fighters like Brock Lesnar or Jon Jones should be allowed to fight women if they identified as women and went through the surgery. Most people would say no because the perception (and almost certainly the reality) is that those two men becoming women would destroy any female opponent, presuming the weight class existed though.

3) In the video (link provided below) parents must decide whether to allow their child to be transgender or continue to medicate the child. On the one hand, they could have a child that appears average, but take over a dozen medications to sleep and cope. On the other hand, these parents have to fear that something bad could happen to their child, especially after getting death threats. Do…