#socialstratification

Social stratification is defined as a set of hierarchical relationships among different groups as though they were arranged in layers (Miller, p218). This photo is a very cute girl at the Gallery of Art. The fancy outfit she wore represents good economic standing. Besides that, the motivation of parents for bringing her there can also reflect the high cultural quality of them. While in China, there are a huge amount of children who cannot afford the price of school, who do not have the educational resources at all. Even some of them need to worry about the resource of foods and clothes. The children who born in rural areas may not have the chance to visit the gallery of art during their lifetime. The social mobility in China has highly restricted the growth of the next generation in the rural area regardless of the economic development in recent years. It takes extremely hard time and the significant amount of efforts for their parents who have little knowledge to support their children improve their life standard, to improve their social status. It is impossible nowadays for a farmer to step into the middle class of China. Education might be one of the solutions, but there are fewer and fewer students from rural area entering into the top universities of China. On the contrary, there are more and more children lived in cities getting the chance to study abroad. Huge efforts are needed in order to achieve the movement of social stratification.

When you hear the term social class you probably think of lower, middle and upper class. They have become the common indicators of where we fall within a society based on our wealth and income. Nowadays there are several models and categories to assign someone's social class position. I choose to utilize the Gilbert-Kahl Model since it shows the occupations that usually rank there, approximate wealth and roughly what percent of the population fits in each category. But, there’s much more to how sociologists evaluate the differences in social classes.

Defining the difference between wealth and income

Let’s define the difference between wealth and income since they help differentiate between inequalities amongst some of the social classes.Although they work aside each other they are different.Income doesn’t yield a return the way wealth does.You can have income and little to no wealth but in most cases, you can’t have wealth without a decent income to obtain it. It also is one way the wealthy are able to stay wealthy as investments yield return and can continue to grow.The wealthy tend to spend less and invest more while the income of other classes tends to be spent getting buy and surviving with little ability to move ahead.

Wealth is a person's net worth overall including all assets minus any of their liabilities and owed debts. Wealth is built up generally over a certain time frame, generally the course of one's lifetime. This includes savings, investment accounts, stocks, bonds, and property including your house, land, and vehicle.

Income, on the other hand, is more immediate. This is what’s earned for profit. It can come in the form of wages from a job, government assistance, or rental properties. It is more “free-flowing” and continually moving, it can, however, last for a short time rather than continual. Examples of this can be seen with job loss and more debt then income scenarios. 

Social Stratification exists in many societies and has all throughout history. The difference, however, was based on the social characteristics of that society and wealth was variable by different forms of hierarchy systems. The effects of these rankings today can be seen in a wide variety of ways. These system rankings placed on us by society sets us up for different life chances from the beginning.

The wealthy often have access to better schools, health care, tend to live longer and children tend to have higher wealth like the family they were raised in. Lower class and poverty-stricken families, however, don’t have access to great schools, may not have access to health care at all, don’t live as long and often are associated with higher crime rates. 

Social Group

The church is a common example of a social group, which is a collection of people who share a common trait or are related in ways other than kinship. Specifically, the church is a primary social group since most members interact with each other on a weekly basis or whenever they attend church services. On the basis of their shared religious beliefs, churches are able to organize programs to help local communities and provide religious services. Often times, many people attend church for the sense of community and social aspects instead of its religious ones. This church pictured above is the United Church which is located on the Foggy Bottom Campus. Due to their shared belief in Christianity, the members of the church provide services such as food pantries, weekly spiritual lectures, and Sunday School. Additionally, due to its German roots, the church is also a part of a more specialized social group of German Christians in the D.C. area since it offers traditional services in German and hosts German language meetups.

Social Stratification

Today I was looking at facebook friends who also have tumblr accounts and came across a video one of these friends posted about how many lives have been lost due to abortion.  I've thought about the various views on this subject at different times.

So, I can understand the fight to rid the world of terminating unwanted pregnancies. I get it that, from a moral standpoint that a woman shouldn't use abortion as a backup birth control plan. Totally get it. Especially from a Christian view point... but then from the same Christian view, I can't help but go beyond that...

I don't understand how many groups and individuals see the subject as pure white and black, and why the fight for life stops after the life exits and exists beyond the womb and birth canal.

What about a mother who could loose her life? (women may have health conditions prior to pregnancy that put considerable strain on her heart and other organs if a pregnancy does occur. Yes, women still die during childbirth. This was the leading cause of death in young women until modern medicine.) Why are we not trying to help the mother who feels there is no other choice but to rid her body of the child? Do we care that the child born to an unprepared mother may not receive the nutrition or health care they deserve? And, what about beyond that - if one is pro-life, you should also be against the death penalty, war, homelessness, and denying the right to health care( to name a few), right? This is the part that really shows an uneducated, position of privilege in staunch pro-life arguments. The fight for life needs to go beyond the fetus, or else it is not an argument for life.

We need to help women before they become pregnant with an unplanned pregnancy. The saddest part is that we don't do enough for people to be in better situations and then condemn them for a mistake they made without knowing how to make better choices.

A gun loving, welfare hating, protestant work ethic believing culture really needs educated about the realities of people on the fringes, especially poverty. We need to see where the true victims are.  We need empathy. We need more understanding for our neighbors. We need to go beyond our ideological beliefs that are based on our own backgrounds of ignorance.  So many have no idea what it is like to be put into a terrifying situation such as an unexpected pregnancy when you have trouble taking care of yourself.

We learn early on in Harper Lee's novel why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird:

"...remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Mis Maudie about it.

"Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird" (90).

Despite the fact that this seems common knowledge, however, it doesn't stop the citizens of Maycomb from contemplating - or even attempting - the murder of several mockingbirds in the novel. Of course, there are the obvious innocents: Boo Radley, whose appearance at the end of the novel seems to unsettle no one more than himself; and Tom Robinson, who apparently "got tired of white men's chances and preferred to take his own" (236). The more one searches, however, the more one realizes that almost every character in the novel is a mockingbird who evades death-by-society at some point in the story, making the title less specific and more universal in scope.

As narrator, Scout Finch spends much of her time explaining the backstory of Maycomb County and its inhabitants. Harper Lee's ingenious expository technique allows the reader to begin to make predictions and inferences about the citizens of Maycomb without ever having been there ourselves; it is as if Lee has opened the door and beckoned us out onto our own front porches, to experience the action as participants rather than as spectators. This makes us as readers complicit in the action, and in a novel as important and resonant as To Kill a Mockingbird, it is crucial that we have some stake in the outcome of the events.

This technique also affords us a deep understanding of the rigid social strata that exist in the world of the novel. In Maycomb county there seem to be:

The old families with money.

The old families with an education.

The old families who are just too stubborn to move, so they currently live on the same plot of land that they did a hundred years ago, which is respectable.

The families with no education but with good manners.

The families with no education and terrible manners.

The African-Americans.

To hear Aunt Alexandra tell it, the social structure is just as rigid as it was for Jane Eyre and her 19th-century British counterparts. Scout cannot associate herself with Walter Cunningham, Jr. because he's not the right kind of people. She's a Finch, and Finches don't do that. Apparently, Finches also do not go to church with their housekeepers, or visit said housekeepers on Sundays, or wear overalls (if said Finches are girls). Despite the fact that Scout is unfailingly polite to Aunt Alexandra's flock of Horrible Lady-Friends, everything she does seems to violate an unwritten social code. Scout knows it, and therefore we as readers know it.

It is not merely Aunt Alexandra who harbors such strong opinions about the social structure. The whole society understands them and obeys them; it's when people attempt to overstep their boundaries that things get out of hand. The most obvious example of this is Mayella Ewell, whose home life is unfailingly horrifying. Sexually abused by her father and deprived of any companionship, Mayella reaches out to Tom Robinson, albeit inappropriately, and with disastrous consequences. When, during the trial, Mayella reveals that she doesn't even know what a friend is, Scout remarks that she is "as sad... as what Jem called a mixed child: white people wouldn't have anything to do with her because she lived among pigs; Negroes wouldn't have anything to do with her because she was white... Tom Robinson was probably the only person who was ever decent to her" (192). Mayella Ewell doesn't belong anywhere; her song is borrowed from others' but she cannot be counted upon to sing her own. She lies on the stand, and even though it is an obvious lie, it is still the lie of a white woman, and must be regarded as truth.

The issue of belonging comes up again and again in the novel, and it is always the character who doesn't belong in a situation who is attacked first. Calpurnia's job is threatened when Aunt Alexandra arrives and declares that Scout needs the influence of a woman. (She tastefully neglects to specify "white woman.") Mr. Dolphus Raymond's reputation is threatened when Dill and Scout discover that the whisky that supposedly drives him to live with the Black community is only Coca-Cola. Atticus's very life is threatened when he decides to protect Tom Robinson at the jail, and again when he competently defends him at trial.

Indeed, if it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, then the very notion of a rigid social structure is a sin. Yet perhaps this is Harper Lee's point. The lives of Jem and Scout finch could not have been saved without the transgression of the social boundaries that frightened Boo Radley into his house, and this would have been the biggest sin of all. Yet, despite the jury's guilty verdict, Atticus sees hope for the future. It took them a long time to return the verdict, he explains. For a moment, there was a chance that the social structure had been overcome. Someday, Lee and her characters seem to hope, that chance will become reality.

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