Race And Social Stratification

RACE AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

The census bureau uses two basic criteria to determine if an individual or a family can be considered in poverty. The first step is to assess the income. There can be different forms of income in addition to that which one would earn from a normal job. There are, for instance, social security, supplemental security income, public assistance ,veterans payments, pension, retirement income, interest dividends, royalties ,alimony, and child support. These are all considered money income. The second step is to calculate the individual's/family's needs (the amount of money required to survive). This is called a poverty threshold. The poverty threshold varies according to the size of the family and the age
I do think, though, that there are some holes in this system. For example, poverty thresholds are a set amount, no matter where you live in America. The cost of living, however, is much more expensive in L.A. than it is in Escanaba. As a result of this there are people who could be starving but at the same time earning an income surplus according to their poverty threshold statistic. I think this could be fixed by making poverty thresholds correlate with the cost of living in different regions. Another problem that I noticed was that people living without conventional housing were not included in the census. I don't know how this can be solved, but if the census dosn't include the homeless then the information regarding poverty must be drastically
There are three different sociological theories that can help explain why these differences exist. They are the functionalist theory,conflict theory and symbolic interactionism theory. Functionalists, like Davis and Moore, would say that social inequality serves an important purpose. It drives people to fill more valuable positions in society. Because society needs cohesion to exist, it creates social stratification which is based in commonly shared goals. If the individual doesn't share the same goals as the society , or occupies a status that doesn't help further the society as a whole, then they have no function except to remind the public of what you shouldn't be. Functionalism is helpful in understanding the basic idea of stratification but it doesn't explain why there is a ten percent disparity between the poverty rate of whites and minorities in America. to explain this we need to take a look at conflict theory. Conflict theorists say that stratification arises out of group competition and conflict. Unlike functionalists they believe that stratification is universal but it is not necessary to the survival of a society. Theorists like Karl Marx believed stratification was a result of exploitation. He broke social stratification into two groups, the bourgeois and the