The Club Functionalism

The vast history and prestige of Ivy League colleges put a lot of pressure on the universities to be ahead of society in all aspects. Many Ivies were open to social change, but Princeton University was not. In Lawrence Graham’s “Member of the Club,” Graham tells the story of his time as a black student at Princeton in the early 1980s. This paper will look at Larry’s college years at princeton through several, widely accepted sociological perspectives. Functionalism is a sociological perspective that's main argument is that everything that happens in society has a positive function to society. Robert Merten, a leader in functionalism, described a function as, “observed consequences [of a phenomenon] which make for the adaptation or adjustment …show more content…
Goffman describes it as an asymmetric “information game” which means it is technically a game between two individuals who interact trying to give information and pick out false information (2). The interactionist perspective can be utilized to better understand how difficult it is to assimilate but still not lose one’s culture. This can be seen in the actual interactions between Larry and others. Larry attempts, and fails many times to “give” the right impression. He always “gives off” the wrong vibe to the people he was interacting with. The best example is when Larry runs into a girl from TWC while with his white friends. The black female is confrontational and Larry tries to “give” his white friends the impression that everything is alright and to leave the two alone to talk. In actuality Larry “gives off” a sense of nervousness, therefore the black female asked the two white friends to stay in order to make it difficult for Larry (Graham 199). The problem is Larry has to live a double life in order to balance both the life between white and black. This forces Larry to have complete control over his expressiveness, and turn on and off two different personalities for two different people. Later in the story he protests for apartheid, even though he admits he is not strongly moved by the movement. He is later confronted by his white friends because he was seen protesting, and is put in a pickle (214). In this interaction he tries to “give” the impression that he was just at the event, but he “gives off” a weird impression of guilt. These examples analyzed by the interactionist perspective display the difficulty of handling interactions while trying to give off separate impressions to separate people. Therefore making it difficult for a human to assimilate, while still being a part of one’s culture like in Larry’s