Social Classes

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in and someone with so many hopes in dreams for themselves gets sucked into doing things the wrong way like drug dealing etc. and the cycle continues to repeat its self.

Over the years some major changes have changed but recently things have remained pretty consistent. One major change in our history regarding the social class system is the rights gained by African Americans. In old times having dark skin automatically put you at the bottom of all social classes, but no a day for the most part all races are considered equal. Interracial marriage is even growing tremendously and that is something that would never have been thought of back in the days of discrimination.

Functionalist perspective: In the video segment “People like us” the woman’s talks about how for eighteen years, her and her family were on welfare. She didn’t like depending of people to meet her needs, so took control and became employed at burger king, where every day she walked 7 miles to work. By becoming employed she had a sense of control with being able to provide for herself and her family. But this could also go the other way, when only getting paid minimum wage, and no help from the government anymore, things might be difficult at times to provide, and she might feel a sense of not being in control of the situation if there just isn’t enough income to support her needs.

Symbolic interactionalist perspective: this perspective plays a huge role because it all has to do with symbols and what they mean to us. In the video segment “Social classes in America”, people are shown a picture of a group of people or an individual and from what they see are asked to determine what social class they believe the people or person in the picture belong to. This whole system of classification is based strictly off what the people are seeing such as clothes, surroundings, appearance, race etc.

Feminist Perspective: In the video segment “people like us” the individual mentions “my friends tell me I should stay home and take care of my kids and go back to welfare income.” when discussing her employment at the local Burger King. The stereotypical idea of mothers would cause her to stay home and be dependent on the government to get by. She would be unemployed living off working American’s taxes, so why should that be what she is supposed to be doing? Instead she chooses to be independent and live off her own income she works to achieve day to day even though she is only making minimum wage she is still making something for herself and her family.

Conflict perspective: this perspective also plays a very significant role in the discussion. In the video segment “Wealth inequality in America” the problems of money distribution are brought to light. It shows how off the balance of income between the social classes are and shows how it is almost impossible for the poor to flourish due to the fact that the top percent of classes possess all the income. The top 1% archive 24% of the nation’s income and own over 50% of stocks. While on the other hand the other majority of American possess about 7% all together and own less the .5% of stocks in the nation. It takes the average worker one month of working to make what a CEO would make in an hour. That is almost 380x the average worker’s pay. With this distribution equality can never be achieved.