What is Social Class, and Why Does it Matter

Class, economic class, socio-economic class, social class. Whats the difference? Each refers to how people are sorted into groups—specifically ranked hierarchies—in society. There are, in fact, important differences among them. Economic Class Economic class refers specifically to how one ranks relative to others in terms of income and wealth. Simply put, we are sorted into groups by how much money we have. These groups are commonly understood as lower (the poorest), middle, and upper class (the richest).  When someone uses the word class to refer to how people are stratified in society, they are most often referring to this. The model of economic class we use today is a derivation of German philosopher Karl Marxs (1818–1883) definition of class, which was central to his theory of how society operates in a state of class conflict. In that state, an individuals power comes directly from ones economic class position relative to the means of production—one is either an owner of capitalist entities or a worker for one of the owners. Marx and fellow philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) presented this idea in  The Manifesto of the Communist Party, and Marx expounded in much greater length in  volume one of his work called Capital. Socio-Economic Class Socio-economic class, also known as socioeconomic status  and often abbreviated as SES, refers to how other factors, namely occupation and education, are combined with wealth and income to rank a person relative to others in society. This model is inspired by the theories of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who viewed the stratification of society as a result of the combined influences of economic class, social status (the level of a persons prestige or honor relative to others), and group power (what he called party). Weber defined party as the level of ones ability to get what they want, despite how others may fight them on it. Weber wrote about this in an essay titled The distribution of power within the political community: Class, status, party, in his 1922 book  Economy and Society, published after his death. Socio-economic class is a more complex formulation than economic class because it takes into account the social status attached to certain professions considered prestigious, like doctors and professors, for example, and to educational attainment as measured in academic degrees. It also takes into account the lack of prestige or even stigma that may be associated with other professions, like blue-collar jobs or the service sector, and the stigma often associated with not finishing high school.  Sociologists typically create data models that draw on ways of measuring and ranking these different factors to arrive at a low, middle, or high SES for a given person. Social Class The term social class is often used  interchangeably with SES, both by the general public and by sociologists alike. Very often when you hear it used, that is what it means. In a technical sense, however, social class is used to refer specifically to  the characteristics that are less likely to change, or harder to change, than ones economic status, which is potentially changeable over time. In such a case, social class refers to the socio-cultural aspects of ones life, namely the traits, behaviors, knowledge, and lifestyle that one is socialized into by ones family. This is why class descriptors like lower, working, upper, or high can have social as well as economic implications for how we understand the person described. When someone uses classy as a descriptor, they are naming certain behaviors and lifestyle and framing them as superior to others.  In this sense, social class is determined strongly by ones level of cultural capital, a concept developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) in his 1979 work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu said that levels of class are determined by the attainment of a specific set of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that allow a person to navigate in society. Why Does It Matter? So why does class, however you want to name it or slice it, matter? It matters to sociologists because the fact that it exists reflects unequal access to rights, resources, and power in society—what we call social stratification. As such, it has a strong effect on the access an individual has to education, the quality of that education, and how high a level he or she can reach. It also affects who one knows socially, and the extent to which those people can provide advantageous economic and employment opportunities, political participation and power, and even health and life expectancy, among many other things. Sources and Further Reading Cookson Jr., Peter W. and Caroline Hodges Persell. Preparing for Power: Americas Elite Boarding Schools. New York: Basic Books, 1985.Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Moore, Samuel, Edward Aveling and Friedrich Engels. Marxists.org, 2015 (1867).Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Moore, Samuel and Friedrich Engels. Marxists.org, 2000 (1848).Weber, Max. Economy and Society. ed. Roth, Guenther and Claus Wittich. Oakland: University of California Press, 2013 (1922).

An Exploration of Grace Nichols Resentment at the Legacy...

The Atlantic slave trade began in the sixteenth century and was abolished in the British Empire in the early nineteenth century. During four centuries American and Europeans nations obtained enslaved people from African slave-traders (although some were captured by Europeans slave traders). Born in Guyana in 1950, author and poet Grace Nichols moved into England in 1977 where she has compiled several books of poetry, many of which discuss the slave trade. Her poem â€Å"taint† is an illustration of her resentment at the legacy of the slave trade. The title of the poem itself is significant; a one emotive word impact: â€Å"Taint† which means spoil, stain or tarnish, a negative word that introduces the reader to what’s to come. I would also argue†¦show more content†¦It also looks as if Grace Nichols is asking the reader to think about this and as I read the poem I could almost hear her voice asking me â€Å"Can you believe this?† The last two stanzas of the poem are much shorter (2 lines each) and for the first time the reader is introduce to Grace Nichols of today which brings her views in the actuality. Contradictory vocabulary is used: â€Å"forget† and â€Å"remember†. I think Grace Nichols is acknowledging that she has not come to term with her ancestral history which she seems to have absorb as her own and the fact that she uses the word â€Å"daily† seems to indicate that she is still very much dealing with these issues to today’s date: ‘Daily I rinse the taint of treachery from my mouth’ Grace Nichols has effectively uses numerous writing techniques in ‘taint’ to convey her ideas and feelings to the reader. As a white reader, I felt uncomfortable reading this poem as if the guilt of my ancestors (the white tradesmen) was lying on my shoulder. May be this was intended by the author who seemed to be, herself, carrying the suffering of her ancestors (the black slaves). Furthermore it could be argued that Grace Nichols is stressing an issues that is still of actuality in some part of the word and far from a selfish plea, I see in her words an appeal from all

Social Injustices Of The United States Essay - 1785 Words

As a country in the past couple years we have had growing occurrences of social injustices. Racism seemed to be a major component behind many of these instances. This really came to light in the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri and yet again resurfacing most recently in North Charleston, South Carolina. An unarmed African American man who, although was resisting arrest, was needlessly gunned down by a Caucasian police officer from a very close distance (Fantz). This is not even the first of the atrocities that have been committed in the past year, and unless we take a stand for change as a nation, I sincerely doubt it will be the last. This not how I lived my life sixty years ago and it’s not how I want to live the rest of it. If I could live a colorblind life sixty years ago, I believe we as a nation in the 21st century can as well. I grew up in a time of great social strife. My wife and I were born before World War II, long before the civil rights movement, yet I was raised in a household where racism did not exist. My mother, an activist far ahead of her time, stressed upon me the importance of diversity and equality. She often welcomed into our home people from all different walks of life. As a child, I experienced and learned diversity from my own dinner table. This way of thinking carried with me throughout my life, from my travels in Africa and Southeast Asia, my career as an officer in the United States military, and my experience as a universityShow MoreRelatedSocial Injustices Of The United States1535 Words   |  7 Pagesthis success she was able to step back and look at the social injustices being committed in the United States clearly, without being blinded by the hardships and the tragedies of being a poor immigrant. 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Genet A Biography Essay Example For Students

Genet: A Biography Essay No biography is ever wholly true. The art of the biographer lies in arriving at the most accurate misreadings possible, and then transforming these into a chronology of psychological and material causes and effects which make up the document of a life. Jean-Paul Sartres now-famous conceit about Jean Genets identity, his coupling of the emblematic categories of criminal and saint, directs one to read the writers life as a merging of the opposed personae represented in all Genets texts by those doubled characters like Solange and Claire in The Maids or LeFranc and Maurice in Deathwatch. In Sartres voluminous study, which did much to establish Genets reputation as one of Frances major 20th-century writers, Genet becomes the existential outsider, both criminal and saint, a figure living beyond the moral boundaries delimiting social and cultural discourse. In this formulation, Genets thieving and homosexuality become literal manifestations of his status as a metaphorical outcast who filte rs the world around him through the perspective of a voyeur. In his stately, almost aristocratic, often brilliant but infuriating new biography (winner of this years National Book Critics Circle award for biography), Edmund White proceeds with a similar strategy, but the conceit he uses to evoke his subject is both more complex and more elusive. White cites a revealing section of The Thiefs Journal in which Genet betrays the way he thinks: In order to survive my desolation, when Id turned back in on myself, without noticing it I worked out a rigorous discipline. The mechanism went a bit like this (since then Ive kept on using it); with each charge lodged against me, no matter how unfair, in my heart of hearts I answered yes. Scarcely had I muttered this word-or a phrase that meant the same thing-than I felt within myself the need to become what Id been accused of being . I recognized that I was the coward, the traitor, the thief, the faggot that they saw in me . With a little patience and thorough soul-searching I was able to discover enough r easons for being named with these names.l grew accustomed to this condition. I admitted it with tranquility. The scorn people felt for me changed into hatred: Id succeeded. Genets character, his self-dramatization, seems to follow from this assertion. He consistently makes himself into a reflection of the image others project onto him, transforming most radically when he accommodates Sartres dialectic by filling the roles Sartre outlined for him in his book. As White shows with remarkable skill, Genet wrote to reinvent himself. He moved from role to role with elusive ease so that the individual, Jean Genet, seemed present only as a sequence of parts assumed to confront the exigencies of the moment. Avoiding sensationalism   How then does one write the biography of an unfixable individual, of an endlessly shifting mask? Genet, for whom writing was a way to order his emotional experience, solved his own version of this problem by celebrating the mask. He re-created his life as myth, as a fiction which moved between the real and the imaginary and his success lay in hiding his self behind layers of constructed facades. His early novels poetically shuffled the identities he performed, arranging anew the many facets of his contradictory personality. White uses Genets autobiographical fictions as documents which cannot be read as verifiably true, but which present embellished versions of Genets inner world, pointing, perhaps, to an apprehension of the imagination which created them. He quotes liberally from those passages in the novels which seem to reflect Genets own responses to the institutions and people around him. But because he suspects the veracity of these poetic passages, White meticulously documents other responses to circumstances similar to the ones Genet experienced. .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b , .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .postImageUrl , .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b , .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b:hover , .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b:visited , .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b:active { border:0!important; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b:active , .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u8cdddad3c7f254e52d816f46d75cbd8b:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Adrienne Kennedy EssayFor example, to arrive at a fuller understanding of Genets infatuation with the Palestine Liberation Organization, White offers eye-witness testimonies from people who were either involved with the group or knew Genet during this period, and supplements them with historical accounts of PLO activities. He then arrives at the conclusion that Genets experience was different from virtually everyone elses. This kind of research is standard practice for most biographers, even those who revel in the betrayal of sordid, scandalous secrets (although White avoids the sensationalism to which a biography of Genet especially might be prone), but standard practice may not be the best strategy for this biographys mercurial subject. White seems to know this: He acknowledges the impossibility of pinning Genet within the pages of his book, but then tries to employ strategies that will achieve exactly that. In the course of his detailed interrogation into the various institutions which affected Genet (using Michel Foucaults historiographic treatise, Discipline and Punish, as a theoretical model), White draws from his analysis of Genets formative years a set of paradigmatic situations which serve to measure Genets adult relationships. His childhood experiences in the home of his poor foster parents, and his later incarceration with the inmates at Mettray an all-male penal colony for delinquent juveniles become, for White, tropes which emerge in the way Genet approaches and assimilates his adult experiences. The hierarchical ordering of prison life becomes a condition Genet seeks out in the organizations to which he later attaches himself. His novels and plays represent worlds that resemble prisons in their authoritarian social organization; even the very media with which he works appear formally ordered and rigorously stratified. Genets sympathetic engagement with oppressed groups that rebelled against prevalent social conditions-the Black Panthers, the African resistance to French imperialism, the PLO-finds a ready parallel with his earlier situation at Mettray and the other prisons where he spent much of his twenties. This sympathy is complicated by his erotic attraction to his personal oppressors, overtly heterosexual figures like the older bullies he married at Mettray, and American and French policemen and soldiers. Fascinatingly repulsive   This literal exhibition of Genets sexuality, both in his writing and his personal liaisons, becomes a way for White to make Genets private expression political. In a recent lecture, White asserted that Genet wrote to seduce the heterosexual reader. He went on to suggest that this motive was decidedly political in its attempt to confront the surface rectitude of Genets audience with the poetic sociology of an alien underworld. Viewed from what might be considered a normative perspective, this focus implies the invention of an other which is fascinatingly repulsive, an other that signifies unknown territory, uncharted human experience, but that attracts by appearing violent and vital-which lends Whites analysis of Genets psyche an importance beyond the narrow limits of the artists particular psychology, and implies that this biography of Genet is also a socio-historic accounting of the culture which made him what he was. But White seems to place himself outside the seductive power of Genet as other. His writing is lucid and elegant, consistently moving away from the lush hyperbole of Genets own prose. He attempts to flatten where Genet ornaments, using his detailed research to get under the surface of Genets texts and into the workings of his mind. But, as White knows, the texts (and the man) retain many layers of onion skin, layers that merge into each other to create a complexly patterned fabric that is at its core a grand illusion. For at the heart of this book is an absence, a hole around which all Whites words revolve. A hole where Genet should be. .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e , .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .postImageUrl , .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e , .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e:hover , .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e:visited , .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e:active { border:0!important; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e:active , .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .ud3b0fb8d658f910cf986c95fa28b7c5e:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Royal Court Theatre EssayAnd Genet remains, like the Queen in The Balcony, in and not in his palace of the imagination, embroidering and not embroidering his lace handkerchief, to be conjured only in and through a fictional language which reflects, always, itself.