Although I agree with the fact that people with higher income aren't doing anything to close gaps in wealth, and that we're grouping people by "wealth, income, and education," I don't believe this grouping is beneficial. This grouping encourages people to feel as if they can't change their future, that they're restricted by their identity. Your identity shouldn't hurt you, it should give you challenges to overcome.
I think people who experience "rags to riches" transformations are people who see society as it is, and are not blinded by the "class system." If you're born into poverty, you're not going to get out if you don't believe you can do great things, even if you don't have privileges that make doing great things easier.
Your argument is interesting. I'm trying to convince people that we're living by our class system and it doesn't exist; classifying people through those objective and subjective criteria is wrong. However, your argument isn't really saying the opposite, just that there are all these factors, but they don't matter much, and we're doing a good enough to not classify people by them.
More on these stereotypes:
In a college lecture, an instructor asked his/her class who they thought of when they thought of the upper class, and "the first two things that were said out loud were the words 'rich' and 'white.'" For the lower class, "people said 'people of color' and 'people living in apartments.'"
These stereotypes are, overall, somewhat muddled. Different people have different ideas of who the different classes are, and it may depend on the immediate region in which you live.
If "women rarely ever push for high salaries or bonuses," and they have the same opportunities as men, why aren't they bushing for the salaries and bonuses? If you're not asking for something because you think you're less likely to receive it than someone else who deserves it just as much as you, don't you have an unequal opportunity.
Income gaps and the resulting social gaps are true facts and not issues of our perception. The issue with these facts are how we apply the facts. Just because there are these gaps between us, why should we let them divide us and change our identities?
As you said, these monetary gaps are affecting our identities through our social, economic, and academic status. However, those statuses are not tied to income alone. Who we are is not what we earn, and we are creating a situation where our identity is that way? Even though how rich or poor you are affects other things, it doesn't change who you are.
It's hard to tell if we really need rich vs. poor stereotypes, or any stereotype in general. My two cents on this is that stereotypes that are detrimental (such as poor people being less happy) cause problems (people believing that they are unhappy because they are poor and therefore "low class," and have failed in comparison to "upper class" people). Thinking of everyone as complete equals may indeed have some unintended consequences, but the rich vs. poor stereotypes are something I think our society could do just fine without.
What I'm beginning to see now from the differences among my argument versus everyone else is that our class system is mostly an illusion. Even though we have gaps between "the rich," "the middle class," and "the poor," the reason the poor suffer and the rich prosper, and the reason reforming these separate groups is so hard, lies in the fact that once you make a certain amount of money, you believe you are happy. Once you're rich, you become happy, and once you're poor, you're unhappy. We need to remove the mental block of wealth equals happiness in order to have equality among people of different incomes, and remove the image of money separating us all.
I feel like this stereotyping and the general stigma about being rich or poor is why we believe there's a class system. For everyone's benefit, we should try to see everyone in the same light to even the playing field, which would eliminate the classes we see, proving they're actually there.
I like your argument and evidence. However, how does the fact that "the 15 states that didn't ratify the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote still haven't ratified it today either" relate to your claim? Just because those states didn't ratify that amendment doesn't show anything, unless you can prove that they would ratify it today (in which case you're showing how far women have come) or that the wouldn't ratify it today (which proves that there is still glaring inequality).
I agree with you. However, what I mean by "If every person genuinely believed in equality, equality would exist" is just that in this hypothetical (perfect-world) situation, equality isn't an issue because everyone practices it. Even though we don't need 100% of the population to believe in equality in order for it to exist, we still need laws to criminalize inequality because there are still people practicing it.
You say: "We will always need improvement on helping others. America needs to become more equal and less leaning towards the rich." This is quite like my point about the class system being perception. Our class system just makes the rich more powerful than the poor, and believing in the "Upper Class" just makes the situation better for them and worse for you, no matter how wealthy you actually are.
You're definitely right about our economic classes, and it's unfortunate that this great divide exists. However, I don't necessarily think removing economic classes will make us "join hands" and to become more unified in general. This is where equality comes in; if our nation is built on the premise of everyone being equal, we can't rank people by their wealth. What we need to do is focus less on money and accept that there are so many different factors in play, so many differences among the poor, and the rich, and everyone in between. We need to understand that every person is so different from everyone else that ranking them is silly and detrimental to equality.
If you use wealth as the only way define someone's social class, we obviously have a class system. However, we're really just blindly grouping people together. Because of how diverse our country is, we can't really perceive classes by wealth alone. Does person A, who is one "wealth-class" below person B but is happier and leads a better life, belong below that person in any ranking?
Title IX was passed in 1972. At that time, there were 170,384 male athletes participating in intercollegiate sports. The number of female athletes participating in intercollegiate sports did not reach the 170,000 mark until 2005-06. It took 33-34 years for the number to catch up to a figure from the 1970's.
The good news is, the numbers are actually close to equal now. In 2008, women made up 43% of college athletes (182,503 of them). This is up from fewer than 32,000 in 1972. It seem that in the last two decades or so, there is more belief in equality, but that belief is not universal. Those who believe in the equality legislation are actually using it as guidelines rather than just meeting it by passing some vague requirement.
The way the legislation is, though, you don't have to have proportionate male and female athletic programs as long as you meet the vague condition of "fully and effectively accommodating the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex."
"Class system" is a broad, tricky concept. It takes into account someone's social, economic, academic, and just their entire identity in general. Taking that into account, the citizens of the United States have diverse identities, so cut-and-dried "classes" can't really exist, but that doesn't mean there aren't certain groups who have their identities influenced by their family, friends, and community. Because of this and the way we tend to lump together a group of people with the same characteristics, a class system seem to exist. We're more or less just looking at the similar parts of a group's identities, and not seeing the differences that create diversity among otherwise similar people. Because there are so many factors going into determining it, the existence of an American "class system" is ultimately an issue of perception. But due to our perception, many of us see a class system, even if it does not exist.
If every person genuinely believed in equality, equality would exist, and there would be no need for legislation to enforce it. However, equality legislation exists. Since we wouldn't need it if there weren't people who didn't believe in equality, the laws should be designed with people trying to get around them in mind, but unfortunately, that's not how the laws are made. We need have needed to create legislation to create equality between the sexes, the legislation is flawed, and people are getting around it. Therefore, women and men are not equal in today's United States.
For an example of this, look at the well-known Title IX from the 1972 "Education Amendments:" laws to create equality among the sexes in educational and other government-sponsored environments. The only language about gender equality in the entire lengthy law is as follows: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program." The rest of the law is exceptions to that rule, and there's nothing else to clarify or elaborate on it. What about private, non-government schools? They can still discriminate however they like; they can be all-boys schools, and that still holds true today.
Title IX provides a very flimsy basis for gender equality in education, now look at it in a place many of us know of: college athletics. In athletics, men already receive much more attention than women, putting female college athletes in a situation where they can easily be discriminated against. In 2003, the Office for Civil Rights made a clarification in which it is more or less stated that an institution in in compliance with Title IX if it meets any of the following three conditions:
(1) the percent of male and female athletes is substantially proportionate to the percent of male and female students enrolled at the school; or
(2) the school has a history and continuing practice of expanding participation opportunities for the underrepresented sex; or
(3) the school is fully and effectively accommodating the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex.
So as long as you "fully and effectively accommodate the underrepresented sex," you're not in the wrong for having way more male than female athletes. This is just passive legislation being added to passive legislation, and anyone who does not believe in equality will be able to prevent equality without breaking the law. This brings me back to my point, that we wouldn't need to make these laws, which are common sense for anyone who wants to promote equality, if we didn't have people who don't want to promote equality. As long as the legislation is so weak, we're not criminalizing anti-equality, and men and women will continue to be unequal, whether people are trying to make them that way or not. Of course, the issue of equality complicated, and we've come quite a long way, but we still have some obvious gender inequality, all you have to see it is read our laws.
