social mobilization and education
Meet Sandra, a mother recently divorced from her abusive middle-class husband. Her previous life had been comfortable; she now lives day-to-day with her children, working as a secretary while attending college courses in her little spare time, all while attending to her home and family. She finally ends up attaining her degree, yet can still find no job paying higher than her secretarial job, so she takes on a second job as a grocery checkout person, still barely making ends meet for her family. As described in Ch. 9 of the Giddens text, this woman had obviously worked very hard to attempt to restore her life back to her previous pre-divorce middle-class state. She says, “You try to do the responsible thing, and you’re penalized, because the system we have right now doesn’t provide you with a way to make it.” (p. 169) However, she learned the hard way that class is not quite as easy to transcend in this so-called “land of opportunity.” The United States is the most highly stratified society of the industrialized world. Class distinctions operate in virtually every aspect of our lives, determining the nature of our work, the quality of our schooling, and the health and
” The Saints were a group of upper class teenage boys, just as delinquent as their lower class counterparts, the Roughnecks. “Blacks are turned down for mortgages at twice the rate of whites with similar incomes. Studies have shown that American society tends to be even more unequal than most other Western societies. Since WWII, there has been a large increase in high-paying managerial and executive positions, as well as blue-collar working class jobs. the educated white middle class man, but those that don’t fit this standard often feel that there is no escape from their lower positions. Social mobility also plays along gender lines, as well as class, making the plight of a poor woman extremely difficult, as seen in the example of Sandra, the working single mother. Herbert Gans examines this concept in his piece, “The Positive Functions of Poverty”. The black middle class, for example, is much smaller than the white middle class, based on ratio of population, and one out of every two black children is poor. Due to this concept, society makes progress for the lower classes particularly difficult, because they guarantee the status of those who are not poor. The poor do not hold enough power to correct the stereotypes that have been placed on them, and therefore continue to be exploited unjustly so that others may rise above them. This surely does not sound like “the land of opportunity” to me. In our society, as well as every other industrialized nation, mobility is based on the idea that the poor are the lowest of the social strata, and that all mobility continues upwards from that point. Even within our society, different ethnic groups have different amounts of mobility. Those who do work, at jobs that pay them 74 cents to the man’s dollar, must come home to put in a “second shift” as a homemaker as well.
Common topics in this essay:
Meet Sandra,
Roughnecks” Saints,
Holly Sklar,
Functions Poverty”,
Herbert Gans,
social mobility,
William Chambliss’s,
one’s status,
middle class,
extremely difficult,
white middle class,
economic class,
downward mobility,
society makes,
movement classes,
poor woman,
mobility society,
|
Acceptance Essays
