Social Class And Its Impact On Society Essay

This highly regarded and scholarly book examines the fundamental paradox of freedom and the establishment of slavery in American history. The central question posed by Morgan is “how a people could have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day” (Morgan 1975, 4-5). The location in Morgan’s research is colonial Virginia, once the largest slave state and home of proponents of liberty. Morgan’s detailed discussion of: the rise of race slavery over indentured servants and poor Englishmen as the solution to workforce growth, a ruling class bound to the English tradition of superiority, and acceptance of lifelong denial of human equality in the face of the fight for liberty demonstrates the paradox for the reader.

As we already noted – in the 1800s expediency of slavery was disputed. While industrial North almost abandoned bondage, by the early 19th century, slavery was almost exclusively confined to the South, home to more than 90 percent of American blacks (Barney W., p. 61). Agrarian South needed free labor force in order to stimulate economic growth. In particular, whites exploited blacks in textile production. This conditioned the differences in economic and social development of the North and South, and opposing viewpoints on the social structure. “Northerners now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free-labor aspirations of Northern society” (Barney W., p. 63).

Social class has been always been in our society since its establishment. Back then, white,

Slavery was a system of forced labor popular in the 17th and 18th century that exploited and oppressed blacks. Slavery was an issue in the US that brought on many complex responses. Slave labor introduced to the United States a multitude of issues that questioned political, economical, and social morals. As slave labor increased due to the booming of cottage industries with the market revolution, reactions to these issues differed between regions, creating a sectional split of the United States between industrial North and plantation South. Historiographers Kenneth Stampp, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genovese, in their respective articles, attempt to interpret the attitudes of American slaves toward their experiences of work as well as the social and economic implications of slave labor.

Although the United States was a British Colony in the early 1700s, the differences between the two were definitely noticeable, especially in the socioeconomic fields, mostly due to the fact that slavery played a much larger role in the United States.

Slavery was a central institution in American society during the late eighteenth century, and was accepted as normal and applauded as a positive thing by many white Americans. In the 1770’s, there were approximately 400,000 blacks in the Southern colonies and 50,000 in the Northern colonies. Slaves were central to the operation of the colonies, especially in the South where they were a crucial element of the labour force. They were treated as inferiors, but living alongside whites, and essential as an exploited labouring class. On one hand, people were advocating liberty from slavery, while at the same time relying on slaves to drive the economy.

After the Thirty Years War, Europe’s economy was depressed leaving many laborers without work. A life in the “New World,” gave European Immigrants a new sense of hope. Indentured Servants were people who sold their labor voluntarily in exchange for free passage to the “New World,” and given housing upon their arrival. They were willing to enter an agreement to work for a specified amount of time, nor were considered the property of the contract holder. Alike in certain aspects, however, divergent in many areas of Indentured Servants, in the early 1600’s Slavery began in America when the first African Slaves brought to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Virginia was one of the first states to acknowledge slavery in its laws, to aid the production of lucrative tobacco crops. In 1670. The law that defined which people could be enslaved declared, “all servants not being Christians imported into this colony by shipping shall be slaves for their lives.” (Norton, Mary Beth. (2015). Initially, slaves were treated as Indentured Servants and given much freedom until eventually slave laws were passed. When the slave laws were passed this had seized any freedoms that might have existed for African Americans. The colonies began to reflect contradictions between Indentured Servants and Slaves. “More important, the laws began to differentiate between races: the association of “servitude for natural life” with people of African descent became common.” (Law

Transitioning from slavery to free-labor created new issues to arise between African Americans and white Southerners. It was believed that if no longer slaves, African Americans still must work. Henry Adams, an African American observing planters, wrote that, “white men would drive colored women out in the fields to work…and would tell colored men that their wives and children could not live on their places unless they worked in the fields.”10 In the same line of thinking, M. C. Fulton requests that freedwomen be required to work, stating that it is impossible for one man to provide for his family while his wife is in “idleness,” without stealing.11 What Adams observed and what Fulton complained about shows two different reasons for pushing freedwomen to work, in a way that, presumably, was different than what was expected of white women. The free-labor system caused disputes in what qualified as “work.” White employers claimed that, “the labor of the employee belongs to him for the whole year, that he must labor for him six days during the week and do all kinds of work required of him wether directly connected with the crop.”12 Freedmen, however, claimed that they had “no other work to do but to cultivate and gather the crop.”13 White employers did not seem to view African American laborers as employees, rather they saw them as slaves with contracts, able to submit complaints about their employment

The shift from indentured servitude to racial slavery in the British North American colonies didn 't occur all at once. Instead, the transition was much more uneven, spreading across different colonies at different times, and triggered by various unique historical incidents. However, two themes show up consistently in the transition from indentured servitude to race-based slavery. First, as more and more indentured servants became free, the wealthy planter class began to perceive these newly freed men as a threat. Indentured servants acquired land at the end of their term, and were able to compete economically with their former masters. To quell this economic threat, the wealthy class began to prefer a system of lifelong servitude, e.g. slavery.

Slaveholders viewed themselves as a superior class of people. “A yeomen farmer from Bell Buckle, Tennessee, Keysaer complained that before the Civil War the slaveholders always acted as if they were of a better class and there was always an unpleasant feeling between slaveholders and those working themselves” (80). Nonslaveholders were known as yeomen and actually did their own work. On the other hand, slaveholders had the slaves work for them. They were lazy and never participated in the work on their plantations. There was often confusion associated with a slaveholder and nonslaveholder. Many questions were asked concerning how their views were alike or different about slavery. Not owning a slave, was not an indication of the preference of a yeomen farmer. Yeomen often wanted to take care of their own responsibilities rather than depending on the help of a slave. However, according to slaveholders, slave ownership was viewed as the preference of the superior class of people. “Indeed, owning slaves apparently made a difference in the perception of class relations in the Old South” (80). “Thus the more prosperous of Keysaer’s fellow Tennessee veterans interviewed many years remembered that relations between slaveholders and nonslaveholders were grounded in “social equality” (80).

Social class refers to the system of stratification of the different groups of people in a society. These different forms of classification are, in most instances, based on gender ethnicity and age. Social class makes everyone’s lives extremely different. For example: How long one can expect to live. In a wide range of ways, from success, to one’s health class, social class influences people’s lives (Grusky,2003).

The idea of social inequality dates back since the time of our founding fathers. The mistreatment and unlawful equality and opportunity that these foreigners received became embedded into our history—this endless list includes, just to name a few, the Irish, Chinese, Jews, and most notably the African Americans (Blacks), who became slaves to the American people. Here in the United States, the current social class system is known as the class system, where families are distributed and placed into three different existing class—the upper class (wealthy), middle class (working), and lower class (poor). Since then, improvisations have been worked on into the class system, establishing now roughly six social classes: upper class, new money, middle class, working class, working poor, and poverty level. Social stratification is a widely common topic of debate because there have since been many arguments and debates on this controversial situation of social inequality and how it relates to social class and social mobility. According to Economist Robert Reich, he states that "The probability that a poor child in America will become a poor adult is higher now than it was 30 years ago..." (Reich, par. 5), meaning the given amount of equality, opportunity, and support that these struggle families obtain have gone mainly unnoticed by the government that it has gotten worst. The constant uproar of social inequality and injustice that these middle and lower working class families stem

1. How may a student's social class origin and related factors impact on her/his learning outcomes and how can teachers intervene to effectively address any resulting disadvantages and injustices for students?

Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. Several ways of measuring SES have been proposed, but most include some quantification of family income, parental education, and occupational status. Research shows that SES is associated with a wide variety of health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children, with effects beginning prior to birth and continuing into adulthood. A variety of mechanisms linking SES to child well-being have been proposed, with most involving differences in access to material and social resources. For children, SES impacts well-being at multiple levels.

Every one of us has our own set of social statuses, these are the position of each individual that they have in this society. I would put myself as an example and these are some of the social statuses that I occupy; I am Asian Filipino, female, a daughter, a friend, a student, and a dental assistant.