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What are the purposes of determining to which social class a person or occupation belongs? How does class background, or current class position influence individual actions? In creating a democratic form of government, Americans had long prided themselves for creating a radically new society divorced from the Old World social hierarchies. Yet social class stratification persisted in the United States since the birth of the nation. Social class has also intersected with gender and race throughout the history of the country. Class stratification serves several functions, not least of which is the ability of a ruling elite—including the owners of the means of production—to exploit the lower classes for labor. Moreover, the elite social classes possess social and cultural capital in addition to financial capital. Forms of social and cultural capital serve to facilitate the actions of the upper classes, while preventing those with lower status to access positions of power. The capitalist market economy exacerbated some of the class hierarchies, while also allowing for the emergence of a new middle class. Although the middle class would never possess the wealth or power of the elite, a middle class does possess some political agency, particularly when engaged in collective action. The purposes of determining to which social...
Ultimately, classifying people and positions according to their perceived class status is critical for preserving existing power hierarchies.
Class background does not necessarily preclude class mobility, but it can. Despite the romance of “rags to riches” stories that abound in the American psyche, dramatic upward social mobility is extremely rare: “Hardly anyone starts at the bottom of the ladder and ends up at the top,” and upward mobility opportunities are “limited” at best (“Social Class in the United States,” p. 1). Current class position will influence individual actions, and individual actions can also be constrained by class background. For example, a person from a particular class background learns values, beliefs, behaviors, and communications styles from parents and community members within the same socioeconomic milieu. Those values, beliefs, behaviors, and communication styles become part of the person’s self-concept, which in turn influences how the person is perceived by others. A person might also act from the belief that class…
For example, in discussing his childhood in "Southie" a poor neighborhood in Boston, Patrick MacDonald talks about the willful ignorance of the people in the neighborhood when he was a child. "They were all here now, all of my neighbors and friends who had died young from violence, drugs, and from the other deadly things we'd been taught didn't happen in Southie" (MacDonald, 1999, p.2). In other words, the
SOCIAL CLASS SYSTEM IN THE U.S. Classism' refers to distribution of national wealth is such a manner that it benefits the highest social class, the elites, and leads to the creation of social hierarchy. "Classism is made up of falsehoods about the frugality and seriousness of the upper class and the profligacy and frivolity of the lower" (Dugger, 1998). While in the Britain and other imperial countries, social classes took birth
Social Class And Health During the Renaissance and Medieval Times THE BASIS OF PRIVILEGE The Diet of the Rich and the Poor What the rich and the poor ate in those times was vastly distinct (Cheng et al., 1999). The nobles and the wealthy could well afford and were served a wide variety of foods by cooks. Poor peasants, on the other hand, subsisted on a few and affordable types of meat and
Holly Sklar writes, "the gulf between the rich and the rest of America will continue to widen, weakening our economy and our democracy. The American Dream will be history instead of poverty." With the advent of more billions into the ranks of the Fortune 400, so it is; instead of witnessing the booming middle class that marked the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, America is undergoing a transformation that more clearly
Social Class My current social class is dependent upon the fundamental reason why I am writing this paper: my level of education. Even though it is an idealization to consider that education in America is as meritocratic as it pretends to be, and whether its high price-tag is merited. The price tag looks particularly high when viewed in comparison with most European countries, in which the cost of university education
Personal Social Class My Parent's Class Position My parents grew up in poverty in Latin America. Their story is not an unfamiliar one in America. My parents were able to obtain a middle school education, which at that time in Latin America, was a good educational accomplishment. Like most children living in impoverished, lower class families, my parents both had to contribute to the household income. Opportunities for earning extra money were