Once one begin to looks for social stratification, we see it everywhere in our society. For while Americans may like to think of our society as being a classless one, in fact it is a thoroughly hierarchical society in which some individuals and some groups have far more status, authority, power, and access to resources than do others. This paper describes two specific examples of the effects of social stratification in my hometown, which I visited last week.
One of the clearest ways in which American society is stratified is by race, and when looking for evidence of social stratification we are likely to find it most clearly demonstrated in the most racially segregated places in our society, as Haviland (2001) argues. Another way of looking at this fact (that high levels of racial segregation and high levels of social stratification tend to be linked to each other in American society) is that when one finds a highly segregated setting one is probably in a fertile place to begin to investigate evidence of social stratification (Haviland, 2001, p. 182).
I began my search for evidence of social stratification in my own city by engaging in what seemed to be just a bit of cheating: I decided to go to a place where I knew there would be such evidence by going to the local welfare office. Even though I was expecting to find evidence of stratification, I have to admit that I was really shocked. John Edwards, when he was running for the presidential nomination, often spoke about "two Americas", and this was certainly my impression when I walked into the welfare office (after going through a security check that made the airport routine seem highly casual). The evidence of difference among the employees (who could serve as proxies for the middle class) and the clients (who were representative of the working class) was plentiful. There were, first of all, differences in race - although these were not as clear-cut as I had first thought that ...