Social Stratification In America Essay

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Bill Gates once said, “If you are born poor it’s not your fault. But if you die poor it is.” The first time I heard this phrase, I thought to myself that in order for a person to be successful and have wealth life, the only thing that person had to do was to work hard until they succeeded. However, recently I figured out that hard work is only half of what is needed and that there are also many more things that come into play such as social class. If one is born poor, there is a higher chance that for the rest of their life that person will remain to be poor rather than moving up to a higher social class. Most of the people that are born poor, die poor and is not because they did not worked hard enough but because the resources that they had …show more content…
That is why those individuals have a similar way of life and they are all in the same layer. This also means that, the people in the higher layer have more resources than people in the lower the layers the might have access or not access at all to resources (Lecture Notes). In the documentary “People Like Us: Social Class In America” shows how the Untied States is a perfect example of social class stratification. Throughout the video it showed how social classes can be based on looks, popularity, where your family works, money, the manners that we have, material things that we own, how much we make and many other things. The video also showed that people liked to apparent to be in higher social class than they were, that most of the people in the United States tended to stay in the same class that they grew up in and that people who are in ranked in a higher class are mainly a combination of money, family name, and attitude. This documentary by PSB was a clear example of the different layers of classes in United Sates showing social stratification and how people in different classes had a different point of view towards life and people in other social

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