American Social Inequality
Most Americans have a keen sense of the presence of inequality. We learn about it in many ways on a daily basis, from our observations of people, homes, cars, neighborhoods, and news accounts of the "rich and famous." There is good evidence that we start to learn about inequality at a very early age and accumulate additional knowledge throughout our lives. Most Americans are aware of different forms of inequality. They know about income inequality and the patterns of discrimination against women and racial and ethnic groups. This awareness can be traced to stories in the mass media or what they may have learned in classes in high school or college. Knowledge of inequality is often conveyed in stories about the gender gap i
The complexity, the contradictions, the madness of modern life lead the average American to alternate between anger, involvement, and frustration and often finally withdraw into some safe haven or escapist activity. This structured class inequality is both the cause and the consequence of the ability to control important resources such as money, education, votes, or information. But the socially aware are probably also overwhelmed by this entity we call society. Inequality is contained within a class system that resembles a game of Monopoly that is "rigged" so that only a certain number of players have a chance to own Park Place, and a great many others go directly to jail. Many of those Americans who are still socially alert and concerned about how our society works read newspapers and magazines, watch news programs on television, or belong to an interest group. For this system to work, the majority of disadvantaged Americans must be persuaded to believe that the way things work out for people is fair. But what about the social arrangements that produce inequality and are responsible for its persistence? A pervasive form of inequality cuts across age, race, ethnicity, and gender to confer privilege on a minority of Americans while relegating the rest to varying degrees of insecurity, need, or despair. This discussion of class in America is a taboo subject because of the national reluctance to examine how the class system of the United States operates on a day-to-day basis. We do not learn from our schools or media how a privileged but organized minority of Americans is able to amass a disproportionate share of our national wealth and to transmit that privilege across generations to create a permanent economic, political, and social elite class. n salary, or the homeless, or the number of children or older Americans living below the poverty line. This is class inequality, a structured system of unequal rewards that provides enormous advantages to a small percentage of people in the United States at the expense of the overwhelming majority. This is done by distracting attention from class inequality and focusing the national spotlight on conflict between Blacks and Whites, women and men, gays and straights, pro-choice and antiabortionist.
Common topics in this essay:
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Blacks Whites,
class inequality,
minority americans,
class system,
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