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Examples Of Cultural Differences In America

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Cultural Differences in the United States of America Affect Class Gaps All countries have a society with classes of some sort. Dividing people into classes can be made using different approaches. One method is to look at different cultures among people and another is to look at income inequalities in a country. The word culture means: how a group of people behave or think. This means that people who think or behave alike are more likely to have similar cultural beliefs. Income inequality division is made from income statistics studies and affects the class division in a country. People who do not have a lot of money often live within the same standards, for example. This essay will argue that cultural differences create misunderstandings between …show more content…

In Nickel and Dimed (2011), the middle-class woman Barbara Ehrenreich explores the working conditions and the living standards of the working class. Ehrenreich encounters situations that she finds unbearable and she questions how some things can be generally accepted. One example is when Ehrenreich gets rashes over her whole body – which prohibit her from sleeping and make her look like a leper. She feels that she can work but should stay home and writes “So it’s in the spirit of a scientific experiment that I present myself at the office, wondering if my speckled and inflamed appearance will be enough to get me sent home. Certainly I wouldn’t want anyone who looks like me handling my children’s toys or bars of bathroom soap” (p. 87). Her employer says that it must be latex allergy and gives her a different pair of gloves. Since Ehrenreich does not want to ruin her undercover investigation she does not argue with the employer. Her co-workers pity her, but nobody finds it strange that she had to work anyway, except for Ehrenreich. This suggests that people from the working class expect that kind of treatment from their employer: and, therefore, they do not react – while middle-class Ehrenreich certainly is not used to being treated like that and expects her employer to care more about her well-being than he seems to be …show more content…

Barbara Jensen’s definition of belonging versus becoming applies to this quoting by Ehrenreich. She is a middle-class woman striving to become and her work is a big part of who she is. Working class people work to belong – they work to make a living and give financial security for their family. This suggests that in order to understand life in the working class: a person has to have some type of understanding and agreement with the values and the culture of the working class. Bringing a middle-class culture into working-class circumstances will not connect well. The important sign of that is that Ehrenreich empathize with her co-workers’ living and working conditions and keep thinking about them as she gets home from work. Middle-class people according to Jensen define themselves by what they do. This suggests that Ehrenreich believes that her co-workers think like her: that they keep thinking about how terrible their working conditions and lives in general are and how much better their lives could be. This implies that Ehrenreich is ignoring the fact that her co-workers have nothing to compare their lives with and that they cannot realistically hope for a life-changing miracle. Which is the opposite of Ehrenreich’s situation since she will return to her ordinary life when her research has been finished.

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