I Intro to Social Problems and Inequality Privilege Oppression Oppression by Frye double bind experienced by oppressed people options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty censure or deprivation ex to be sexually active or not hoe or prude Oppressed people live life with forces and barriers that are not accidental but are symmetrically related to each other like a bird cage If you look closely at one wire you don t see the rest and assume the bird can fly around But when you step back and look at the cage as a whole you realize there is no getting out That s why it s hard to study oppression because you don t look at it as a whole sometimes Oppression A system of social inequality through which one group is positioned to dominate and benefit from the exploitation and subordination of another Frye s features of oppression 1 Double bind damned if you do damned if you don t 2 Systematically related forces being caged in oppressed people have their lives shaped by forces that are not accidental or occasional are avoidable but are systematically related to each other in a way so that it penalizes motion in any direction Birdcage metaphor if you look closely at a wire in the cage you cant see the rest and then you wonder why it cant just fly around that s because when you take a macro view you can see it as a cage in whole and it can t II Classism and Social Problems Class Inequality Tired of Playing Monopoly by Langston In America if you work hard enough you can get ahead apparently and we believe in luck and the unlucky just happen to come from certain race gender and class backgrounds If people are poor we say it was something they didn t do they were poor lazy unlucky didn t try hard enough etc blaming the victims myth of the classless society Class is socially constructed and all encompassing it affects how we perceive and what are our choices Education schools in every town reflect class divisions Jobs middle class can choose jobs and working class have to just survive The Working Poor Nickel and Dimed 2011 Version by Ehrenreich Between her book and now the economy has gone downhill and the difference is that now there is a high level of unemployment People can t buy their prescriptions food pay their rent and suicide as gone up Food stamp program responded well but welfare hasn t Poverty has been criminalized in America Being in poverty leads to you being a criminal by law sometimes charging you even more 30 Days Minimum Wage difficult to escape poverty because min wage doesn t allow a person to pay for the things they need Prices have gone up and pay hasn t unemployment has gone down It was hard for them to pay for rent medical expenses especially and food gas Its hard to get people what they expect to have or want with min wage especially children and people with large families III Sexism and Social Problems The Social Construction of Gender Night to His Day by Lorber Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that we usually don t pay attention to it Once you are born you are given a sex category based off of your biology and then becomes a gender status through naming dress and the use of gender markers Sexual desires and feelings have been shaped by gender norms by the time we re in puberty As a social institution gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives Some societies have different amounts of gender it is socially constructed Tony Porter A Call to Men Man Box has qualities about what is a man But some stuff in it is wrong and we should challenge it If we are teaching men that its wrong to be act like a girl that its completely embarrassing and wrong then how are we essentially teaching people of women As men they are taught to value women less treat them as property and to objectify them and that equals violence against women We must teach them its okay to practice equality and show emotion Sex is biological differences between people and gender is social and cultural meanings attached to femininity and masculinity Socially constructed because gender changes over time and place and traits are based on sex and create unequal social arrangements that are legitimated through social institutions Gender roles are expectations regarding the proper behavior attitudes and activites of females and males IV Racism and Social Problems Race is physical characteristics that have been selected to identify people self identify and how people identify you Ethnicity is cultural and or national origin The Social Construction of Race Racial Formations Omi Winant Social sciences have rejected biological notions behind race and favor an approach to it as a social concept Racial categories have a historical context In different countries people are considered different races One of the first things we notice is race and we use our preconceived notions of what each racial group looks like to characterize them Presence of a system of racial meanings and stereotypes of racial ideology seems to be a permanent feature of US culture Race is unstable and is constantly being transformed by political struggle Black White Wealth Gap The Hidden Cost of Being African American by Shapiro There is a gap between white and blacks that doesn t have to do with the way they use their money but is something they can t really control Whites start off with more money sometimes because they have family inheritance that blacks do not hold Sometimes people have unearned inherited wealth to lift them economically and socially When people use assets to transform their lives it has racial and class consequences African Americans have been frozen out of the mainstream American life over the first half of the last century Black white wealth gap the contemporary disadvantaged status of blacks cannot be divorced from the history of discriminatory policies enacted against them by the U S govt Even among families with similar incomes the availability of transformative assets will have a profound impact on shaping their life chances The Difference Between Us Episode 1 of Race The Power of an Illusion Students found after testing their DNA that genetic variation within races was much larger than they thought and some were even closer to others outside their races There is few differences genetically and there is as much difference within any racial group Geography is the best explanation for an accumulation of a certain gene is a specific area They had exact matches in