Maya Thomas Black Power Movement Black Power: Politics of Liberation Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton began their book, Black Power: Politics of Liberation, with their first contention, that overt and institutionalized racism is rooted in colonialism. Unlike European colonization, here the colonized individuals were imported to these shores. Once emancipated, black people, continue to be colonialized through the manipulation of politics. They go on to elaborate how whites continue to use politics to institutionalize racism in education, voting, housing, jobs and other areas of life. They take the reader through pivotal moments in the South and North to enumerate the chain of events that lead to the achievements and failures of the African-Americans in society.
Rothstein offers a very comprehensive review of a myriad of factors influenced by socioeconomic class and their potential effects on the achievement of students. He addresses genetics (Rothstein, 17), childrearing techniques (19), nutrition (44), alcohol and tobacco use (42), and a variety of health-related physical aspects (37-42). In the article More than just race: being black and poor in the inner city by William J. Wilson, the author analyzes the fragmentation of African-American families and the underlying causes of this breakdown. Wilson begins with discussing the 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He illustrates the rise of the “black perspective” and its effects on the serious social scientific study of urban poverty (Wilson, 99).
Since the low class poor people are not usually educated, they often easily “pushed” into the crimes by the high class people. Usually the upper class people are invisible and at the end the poor is the ones who get blamed. Certainly the rich benefit more than the poor. That has always and will always be the case in every society the world has known. Very often the rich push the poor by removing workers rights, by limiting corporate liability, by instigating war.
To support his thesis, he pointed out that any lower social class was sent to do manual labor. Some however, were simply better and cheaper to have as slave laborers, such as the African Slaves. (Williams 10) Racism was simply a consequence of slavery so that people could justify the idea of employing and owning slaves. For many years, historians and sociologists have debated the relationship between racism and slavery. Some contend that slavery caused and perpetuated racism, while others argue that racism caused and perpetuated slavery.
Competition also creates companies to drive down wages, as they will wish to make their products at the lowest cost they can, this alienating the working class and causing them to become impoverished. Marx is often criticised as his two-class system is often seen as too simplistic. Weber divides the proletariat into skilled and unskilled class, and includes white-collar proletariat and small bourgeoisies. Marx believes that capitalism sows
He looked to overthrow the capitalist system in favour of the structuralist approach (Perry, 2009). Marxists will always argue that the most important thing is the question of how a small group of people can exploit a vast majority of the population. They would study the power and wealth and look at the importance of social class division (Fulcher, J et al, 2007). Karl Marx believed there were only two basic classes’ the middle and the working class. Marx called the middle class the Bourgeoisie as they were either land owners or the bosses of factories and controlled society.
White industry owners before this time would find it necessary to hire white workers over black workers in any position, which limited and crippled Blacks in the labor market. Grossman states “the emergence of the physical ghetto coincided with widening racial discrimination in Chicago and other northern cities, which forced blacks to make decisions circumcised by their exclusion from a variety of social and economic institutions. Increasing separation opened new opportunities for business, professional,
Social inequality is where a set of people are treated better than other people based on stratification. Social class structure is grouped according to wealth, income, education and even social networks. A method to distinguish where individuals stood in a social class was established by social expert in order to organize a class system with discrete social classes. These representations mark upper class making up the wealthy, an upper middle class consisting of professionals. Then there is the lower middle class who consist of semi-professionals, the working class who consist of well respected blue collar workers and the lower class consisting of the working poor and underclass.
The bourgeoisie minority class exploit the proletariat- majority class to make profit. Marxists argues that education prevents the working class from succeeding and therefore the role of education is to transmit the ruling class ideology. Sociologists like Althusser states that there are two main elements by which the capitalists maintain their dominant positions. These are ‘the repressive state apparatus’ and ‘the ideological state’, he argues that education reproduces class inequality and also justifies inequality by producing ideologies that this function is to pursed workers to accept their lower positions in society. According to Bowles and Gintis this is achieved through the ‘correspondent principle’ capitalism requires a work force with the right attitude and personality by workers willing to accept inequality and hard work to produce an obedient work force.
He went to garment industry employers and offered them contracts that gave workers the minimum wage in exchange for bribes paid directly to Johnny. The companies were protected from organizing efforts of other unions, but workers were locked into lousy wages by their own union. Corruption hurt union members directly and dragged the image of organized labor into the gutter. And due to the fact that minorities tend to be disproportionately represented in unions, the growth of unions can also lead to higher levels of disparity in income. Unions not only lead to higher average wages among their employees, but they also contribute to higher levels of unemployment among those who are not members.