Culture
- How is society stratified?
- How does this stratification affect academic services in the current society?
- Is racial discrimination still rife in present-day society?
- What are the forms of segregation today?
- How can these segregations be healed?
The above five questions arose from the daily observation of the trends and occurrences in the current-day American society. People appear to be in a rush and nobody looks concerned or bothered with what happens to the other. It is very surprising how two people can travel on a train from Illinois to New York seated next to each other while both are engrossed on their smartphones and pads without paying attention to each other. This business and a rush to nowhere, in particular, has a deep history and to some extent would be presenting a modern-day form of segregation.
These questions were thus formulated to be discussed with colleagues at school to determine their thought on the same issues that seem to affect greatly the lives of every individual yet people continue to play blind to them. On the education services, I did seek to determine what influences the choice of schools that students end up studying in, there are different schools in the society, some charge higher fees than others with those charging higher fees boasting of some other additional services. They have students and a closer study of these students reveals some disparities with those in some of the schools that render their services at cheaper fees.
The wording of the questions would not limit wording, these are questions that seek to solicit opinions from the respondents, structuring them to be closed-ended would not be relevant to the study. A yes or no question limits responses and one would easily manipulate the respondent to receive that type of answer he or she would want. The open-ended questions thus become relevant as they solicit views and elaborations that are free from corroborations from whichever quarter. The responses that the questions draw are as divergent as the views held by the respondent would ever get.
American society today is stratified in the economic class system. There are poor or otherwise known as being in a low class. Not a majority of the population belongs in this class though. The lower class is preceded by the middle class, this is the class of the employed and constitute of people who spend between one thousand five hundred to two thousand dollars a fortnight, this makes for a majority of Americans. Finally, there is the upper class which constituted by the very rich members of the society, mostly business people who run multinational corporations. Being the largest economy in the world, the American population has more people in this class and they can always be spotted being moved around in a large chauffeur-driven limousine.
These societal segmentation helps determine which school one takes his or her child, the standard of education in most of the American schools a lot similar with the government always ensuring this, but other auxiliary services that are offered in some of these schools coupled with the amount of prestige that some of the collages have enjoyed since inception would not allow each any other member of the American society access their services. Only the very rich take their sons and daughters to such schools and this, therefore, becomes a big determinant of the type of education that one gets in the current day America.
Racial discrimination was more of a state of the mind than it was a physical being. The African Americans who felt largely discriminated against were the most conscious of the difference in the skin colors. They would attribute every single act of aggression leveled against them by a white as having been done so simply because they were blacks. This is a notion that took very long to clear as most of the African Americans were very reluctant to let go of the mindset.
The current occurrence of African American children terrorizing the tourism city of Philadelphia and its environs has once again led to more attention being paid on the racial connotations in some of the American states. The stereotypes that were created around the African American as being uncouth and unschooled have currently following the flash mobs in Philadelphia come to the fore. The result of this is that whites would start avoiding the blacks especially the youths and these avoiding acts eventually would result in segregation.
With the forms of stratification discussed above, there is thus some need to study the types of segregations that come as a result. The whites black animosity that existed in the 1930s is currently not there and this is evident with the white house currently housing a black occupant. This means that a black can be rich and so can a white be poor. The society is thus segregated as such. This segregation is done in a manner that one would not openly realize it.
The rich can rarely be associated with the poor in the current day America that everyone keeps to him/ herself. People have life covers and have subscribed to different social security systems and those who are unable are all hooked to life support, this makes the economy self-sufficient. But in this self-sufficient, the rich still would never interact with the poor. This type of discrimination is done in that the social places that they frequent would not be accessed with any other poor person. The shopping malls that they go to are just so exorbitant that any other low or middle-class member would not contemplate visiting.
The segregation that exists in American society based on skin color is extremely detrimental. The society right now can not afford to be divided along racial lines, thanks to intermarriages that have been witnessed in the past as it has helped reduce the intensity of racial animosity. The stereotypes around African American society can be done away with. African Americans just like any other section of the American population went to school and became professionals who are now respectable members of society. The marauding black youths in the city of Philadelphia and its environs are just a representation of a failed institution of the family.
If only parents would become more committed to the affairs of the family and concentrate on giving the families the best that they can offer then the youths would become distinguished members of the American society and the remaining specks of stereotyping the African Americans would not resurface. The president currently is an African American and his election was a great show of societal maturity as he was unanimously voted by both the blacks and the whites. This showed that stereotyping and segregation was indeed a thing of the past.