Inequality In Sociology

September 11, 2001 and in its immediate aftermath, was probably the last time that the people in the United States were unconcerned about social inequality. The terrorist acts that occurred on that day brought the nation together against a perceived common enemy. However, in the few years following that short lived period of solidarity, the nation went into a tailspin, beginning with the Great Recession of 2008 and climaxing in the current period of social unrest, the underpinnings of which reside in racial inequality, wealth inequality, and gender discrimination. The implications of these various social inequalities are the repeated outbursts of racial violence, the continued destabilization of the economy, and political strife that paralyzes …show more content…
This false perception may in part be due to the overabundance of crime shows on television or the sensationalism of the news by twenty-four hour cable news networks. Yet, the dominance of racially charged events, in particular of those in regards to African-American youth being killed by white police officers, as in the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (Introduction to Sociology 2e) or, as in the case of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen year old black teenager who was allegedly racially profiled and subsequently shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a white-Hispanic community watch program coordinator (Introduction to Sociology 2e), has garnered not only the attention of the media but has resulted in the national movement called “Black Lives Matter”. Similarly, due to the rise of the Hispanic population which has now supplanted that of African Americans as the largest minority population in the United States, the nation’s government is posed with new problems of racial inequality as Latino workers have been shown to suffer from not only a disparity in pay but also a lack benefits such as paid leave or workplace flexibility (Glynn & Farrell, 2012). Furthermore, as the government attempts to enact …show more content…
At each opportunity, Americans must put aside their differences and walk in the shoes of their fellow man or woman. Only by closing the financial gap between the wealthy and the lower class can we preserve the middle class. Only by closing the financial gap between men and women can we preserve the family unit. And only by not seeing race, gender, or color, can we preserve our way of life. As the president once noted, “we are not blue states or red states, we are the United