Social Stratification In The United States

Social Stratification is a “system by which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy,” (Godwin, PPT). In America today social stratification is used in a term called socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status is “ an individual's position in a stratified social order” (Conley 254). Meaning that how a person is seen by society is ranked in categories based on that individual in an order of hierarchy, the position an individual holds on that hierarchy is their socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status can be defined by categories, although the boundaries are not closed to an exact edge. Today in contemporary American stratification smaller-level categories help divide individuals from society as a whole into classes. These categories …show more content…
Higher class is a small class when compared to the middle class and the lower class. Middle class on the other hand makes up the majority of America, this is a widely known class (Conley, 255). Normally, when a person is asked what class they fall in the answer is mostly “ middle class”. The middle class holds so many people due to the fact that most of the individuals who are classified into this class hold similar jobs which make this group so wide range. Lower class, or the poor, is individuals who live below a set poverty line (Conley,259). In America today we naturally rank people into a socioeconomic class without even recognizing we are doing it. Without even being taught what a social class means we have grown up knowing the difference between the rich and poor. Personally, in America today I think that social stratification is not taken as serious, simply because we are so casually judgmental we do not truly think about ranking people based on a variety of traits, we normally just look at how a person looks and classify them as either rich, poor, or in between. Social inequality can occur between socioeconomic

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