Social Problems In America Essay

Akers, R. (2006). Parental and peer influences on adolescent drug use in Korea. Asian Journal of Criminology.

Humans define race by how they conceive and categorize different social realities. Thus, race is often referred to as a social construct. The differences in skin color and facial characteristics have led most of society to classify humans into groups instead of individuals. These constructs affect us all, and they often result in situations where majority racial groups cause undue suffering to those that are part of the minority. The understanding of race as a social construct is best illustrated by the examination of racial issues within our own culture, specifically those that have plagued the history of the United States.

Everyone knows what the word poverty means. It means poor, unable to buy the necessities to survive in today's world. We do not realize how easy it is for a person to fall into poverty: A lost job, a sudden illness, a death in the family or the endless cycle of being born into poverty and not knowing how to overcome it. There are so many children in poverty and a family's structure can effect the outcome. Most of the people who are at the poverty level need some type of help to overcome the obstacles. There are mane issues that deal with poverty and many things that can be done to stop it.

More than 800 million people in the world are malnourished, 777 million of them are from the developing world (Raphel, S., 2014). Poverty is an issue that must be addressed to the population loud and clear or everyone will end up suffering. There are many families trying to survive and live from paycheck to paycheck. Unfortunately, there are some families that are unable to support himself or herself or any family member. One important key issue of poverty in the United States is inequality. Many Americans blame the poor people for their own fate but you should never judge a book by its cover. There can be many reasons why an individual or families end up in poverty. For example, low wage jobs, discrimination and social inequality, vulnerability to natural disasters, war and political instability. Another big issue we face today is child poverty. This is a very critical issue because these young children are our future. If we let these children live in poverty, there is a higher chance they will drop out of school, look for work in order to support their family, or give up in life.

Socio-cultural definitions of race are created by society as a tool to further economic goals. The development of

Throughout this essay, I will be discussing what I believe to be the four most important problems facing the United States of America today. I will present these problems in order for most important, to least important. I will talk about how these problems came to be and discuss what my research stated. I will then give my reasoning for selecting each problem and discuss my ideas for correcting these problems.

     Many of Americans today do not take the time to realize that our nation is little by little falling apart. Our leaders are corrupt, our environment is being destroyed, and there are thousands of children being born each day. The three major social problems facing the American citizens in the 21st century are births to unmarried woman, being able to trust or government and or leaders, and lastly destroying the environment.

The issue of poverty in the United States seems to lie on the grounds of race education and family structure. As expected I found that educational levels paralleled poverty levels. Unexpected , research was found to prove that race did in fact play a substantial role in poverty. Family structure along with other influential factors either locked an individual into poverty or provided a means for escape from the continuing cycle. Other factors contributing to poverty was the location of homes or neighborhoods and the accessibility to better paying jobs.

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of

"Events in the nineteenth century made it abundantly and irrefutably clear that race as a concept sui generis superseded social class as the dominant mechanism of social division and stratification in North America." (Smedley 219) For many decades people have been using race as a way to classify humans into different social categories. Lower, Middle, and Upper classes were created to divide humans into appropriate categories using their individual lifestyles, financial income, residence, and occupation. People decided to ignore this classifying system and classify one another,

Looking in the mirror and seeing our self-grow, and change is surprising. Whenever we stop for a minute and think about our life everything is different. Not only you and I changed; the place we live in changed too. Anyone can tell that American society is changing from day to day. Changes usually don’t come fast, even though we are impatient to wait. America’s society changed day by day, time by time, and year by year.

When Europeans arrived in the America, they encountered people whom they had never before seen. The natives were viewed as savage and uncivilized, regardless of their well-established culture and presence. As the colonies formed and Africans began their slave-bound voyages to America, many colonists perceived them as inferior. Eurocentrism allowed for a foundation on which the race concept was built and flourished. As research shows, there is only one species of human beings, Homo sapiens. “Race,” used as a construct to stratify societies, is not a reference to biological variation.

In the world, both rich and poor countries have got different forms of social injustices that their respective societies are going through. Briefly this paper will address social injustices in the United States and under the social injustices, the paper will focus more on Economy, health and society injustices. This will be approached with three questions; Firstly, why is it important for American people to know about social injustices in the States? Secondly, how has America’s social justice been violated and why? Lastly, what are some of the measures that the US government has taken to address the issue of social injustices, which include Unemployment, endless crimes and terrorism, social classes in American societies with different

Race is a social construct that was created by the Europeans in order to minoritize different racial groups. In the reading by Bonilla-Silva, he defines race to be manmade, “This means that notions of racial difference are human creations rather than eternal, essential categories… racial categories have a history and are subject to change.” For example in a lecture by Dr. Aguilar-Hernandez, he stated that the Irish, Italians and Jews were called black before but are now considered white, Mexican-Americans were also considered white up until the 1980s. These ideas lead to the racialization of racial groups.

Over the years in our country’s history it has been apparent that the idea of same sex marriages is becoming much more popular, however in most states there is still one thing stopping them. That one thing stopping two people from the pursuit of happiness which they desire is a social injustice. Social injustices are situations where a person or group of people is treated unfairly due to certain factors for example discrimination, prejudice, racism, heterosexism, sexism, and so forth. In the case of same sex marriages, the factor playing a major role in this social injustice is where most people believe that opposite sexes attract, but in the case of a same sex couple wanting to be married, this brings about many topics to be discussed by