Social Class in America: Race, Gender, and Inequality

The Widening Gulf Between Rich and Poor

As Holly Sklar writes, "the gulf between the rich and the rest of America will continue to widen, weakening our economy and our democracy. The American Dream will be history instead of poverty." With the advent of more billionaires joining the ranks of the Fortune 400, that prediction rings true. Instead of witnessing the booming middle class that marked the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, America is undergoing a transformation that more clearly delineates the boundary between classes than ever before.

With economic segregation an ever more encroaching reality, the distinctions among race, age, and gender have come under increased scrutiny as Americans are forced to examine the origins of social class, its solidification in early childhood, and its place in national life.

The development of this economic inequality is the result of monetary policies, budget decisions, wage-setting practices, corporate and governmental benefit structures, and business regulations. All of these factors combine to create a national atmosphere in which the flow of resources to those most in need is curtailed, the housing market grows more expensive, educational affordability declines, and low wages receive little protection in the face of government-friendly relations with big business. As wealth accumulates at the top, the middle, lower, and working classes are steadily squeezed out.

Weber's Theory of Social Stratification

Collins and Yeskel argue that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast brought the issue of social class and its national construction to the forefront of public concern. As the floodwaters wiped the poor out of New Orleans, the financial distinctions between those who could afford to evacuate and those who had little choice but to stay became unmistakably clear to nearly all Americans. The thousands of poor residents who lost their homes, jobs, schools, and dreams of independence were only a portion of the nationwide population of the working poor, whose separation from billionaire CEOs at the top grows more pronounced by the day.

In academic circles, social class describes the relationships between individual agents and groups as they navigate social hierarchies. Max Weber famously defined social stratification through a three-component theory widely adopted by sociocultural scientists. Weber viewed class as the composite of three distinct elements: the economic relationship of an individual to the market, his or her status with regard to non-economic capital such as educational attainment, and political affiliation. By strict construction, he assumed these factors were unrelated, but in practice they play an important and intrinsic role in defining one another. For example, the educational opportunities available to the elite extend well beyond the free public education provided by government; without the financial means to afford more, higher attainment remains out of reach.

Class, Poverty, and Childhood Experience

The glass ceiling that pervades American life defines not only one's education but all aspects of one's position in, relation to, and understanding of social class. In the capitalist marketplace, these correlations are more exaggerated and play a more defining role in everyday life. Louis Brandeis argued that this dynamic undermines the egalitarian precepts of a democracy: "You can have wealth in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both."

While America professes to support all its citizens — particularly its most vulnerable — millions of children are born into poverty each year. Growing up, they do not get to ride brand-new bikes on their birthdays; many do not even have the luxury, reserved for the upper classes, of attending a safe elementary school. Like Pharoah and Lafayette Rivers, children born into the heartbreaking poverty that exists on American soil grow up witnessing two worlds: the one where neighborhoods are not neglected by governments, where criminals do not dominate inner-city blocks with violence, where cartoons are not interrupted by gunshots — and, by contrast, the world they actually inhabit.

"There are no children here," their mother explains. "They've seen too much to be children."

The Rivers boys grew up in a Chicago housing project, in a family of six with a largely absent father. Their effectively single mother struggled to provide some semblance of a normal home life, but the criminality and pathology pervading her inner-city neighborhood deprived the children of the innocence that those not financially disadvantaged are allowed to keep. While critics of the welfare system contend that children like these have every opportunity to use the American education system to attain their dreams, the very fundamentals of their lives place them in a different reality — one that prevents easy advancement. As children of a specific social class, they experience a specific societal texture; that fabric does not allow for the social buoyancy available to middle-class children. Their schools are understaffed, and their friends' lives are filled with depressing trauma. They do not live a childhood that builds toward future success; they spend their early years simply coping.

These early lessons play an important role in defining their place in society. Although it was not their choice to be born into a Chicago ghetto, that stigma follows them into every other sphere of American life. Despite their own goodwill — Lafayette's struggle to overcome his difficulties and excel at school, for instance — they are branded as members of a specific class. As Alex Kotlowitz renders them in There Are No Children Here, they become symbols for an entire group. As they grow older, these difficulties do not diminish. Popular films like Hoop Dreams make plain the struggle that young men socially cast in a specific class face even through college. William and Arthur are stories of perseverance — they play basketball in college and aspire to go professional — yet popular attention focuses not on their achievements but on the class into which they were born and from which they have little means of escape.

Traditional Weberian and Marxist perspectives illuminate the "injuries of class," but they leave little room for the isolated factors that govern mobility between classes. The role of blame in the entrenchment of class is also a powerful force that keeps classes separate. The distinctions are clear to children, and growing up within one social class keeps an entrenched culture of exclusion and internalized shame active in the child's mind, as one Vivian Adair subject powerfully illustrates:

"My kids and I been chopped up and spit out just like when I was a kid. My rotten teeth, my kids' twisted feet. My son's dull skin and blank stare. My oldest girl's stooped posture and the way she can't look no one in the eye no more. This all says we got nothing and we deserve what we got."

Conclusion: Confronting Class in America

Because social class is established early in life, as a child grows, his or her understanding not only of oneself but also of others is shaped by age, gender, and race. Confronting the problem of social class in America — and its strict delineation of the broader population — must be addressed across all of these dimensions if the nation is ever to benefit from the enormous wealth of talent locked within the confines of "class."