Social Inequality In America

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The American Dream, work harder than your fellow man and you will be more deserving of the nicer things in life. America is the place you place you can come to where anyone can be rich or make it big. It is the land of opportunity isn’t it? Yet there are homeless in our streets and families who cannot pay the rent at the end of the month or keep their kids fed. How did this system of inequality come to be? Why and how does it persist? What does it mean for the people of today?
Social inequality is nothing new, and has been in place for thousands of years. The origin of social inequality traces all the way back to the Mesopotamian Ubaid society in 6500 BCE (Carter). Religion was the main influence of inequality then, and has evolved to have many factors today. Yet, one of the biggest influences of inequality today, is how much money you have. Take for instance, the documentary Park Avenue. The ladder part of this documentary shows how the top one percent
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None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor.” I saw this during the life exercise in class. Many of my classmates were in debt at the end of the month, or were scraping by. This is a small representation of America’s upward mobility. America ranks last in upward mobility among other developed nations (Park Avenue).With a low chance to grow your income, people in poverty lose hope. Usually, people who are in poverty, will stay in poverty. Rarely will they get the right help to climb out of poverty, and into a regular life.
The system in place is rigged. Too easily, the rich make sure they stay rich and the poor get poorer. Controlling politics is one way the rich control the system. Because we are born into this system, it is easy to “accept” these things as they are and feel powerless to change the systems of society. Unfortunately, inequality will continue to persists, as being unequal gives people little power to fight