Stratification
This belief says people succeed mainly because of talent and effort, not structural advantage.
What is meritocracy?
The movement of jobs out of the country or region.
What is deindustrialization?
This discriminatory housing practice denied services and investment to neighborhoods based on race.
What is redlining?
This reading by Peggy McIntosh is about the hidden advantages that white people often do not notice.
What is “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”?
A profit-oriented economic system based on the private or corporate ownership of the means of production and distribution
What is capitalism?
This reading follows a low-wage worker struggling to survive on wages that are not enough to live on.
What is “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”?
This type of economy relies more on service-sector jobs than factory production.
What is the service economy?
This kind of racism is built into social systems, even when individual prejudice is less visible.
What is institutional racism?
This reading by Dena Samuels argues that language can reinforce domination and exclusion.
What is “Sounds and Silences of Language: Perpetuating Institutionalized Privilege and Oppression”?
Refusing to associate with members of a group merely based on the concept of race is known as what form of racism?
This reading argues that invisible privileges make inequality look normal and fair.
What is “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”?
This reading focuses on the crisis faced by inner-city communities after stable work disappears and discusses the increase in service jobs.
What is “When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor”?
This reading explains how housing discrimination helped create long-term racial wealth inequality.
What is “Race, Homeownership, and Wealth”?
This term refers to the unequal ability to shape social norms, policy, and institutions.
What is power?
Stratification is needed because it ensures that people with the right abilities end up in the right positions
what is stratification through structural-functional theory?
This author argues that corporate elites and upper-class networks have outsized power in American society.
Who is G. William Domhoff?
This reading shows the social costs of losing industrial jobs and stable working-class livelihoods.
What is “The Social Costs of Deindustrialization”?
This reading explains the Black-white economic divide through accumulated advantage and disadvantage.
What is “The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap”?
This Audre Lorde reading warns that tools of oppression cannot build liberation.
What is “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”?
Any act that violates a formal normative code that has been enacted by a legally constituted body.
What is crime?
This concept names the unequal distribution of rewards, power, and life chances across social groups.
What is stratification?
These are common labels for manual labor, service labor, and office/professional labor.
What are blue-collar, pink-collar, and white-collar jobs?
This example of environmental injustice shows how segregation and racism shape where harmful facilities get placed.
What is “Solid Waste Facilities in South Carolina: Issues of Racial, Economic, and Environmental Justice”?
This reading asks what people can do to challenge oppression in everyday life.
What is “What Can We Do?” by Allan Johnson
This article argues that the real problem is how expensive healthy food is and how junk food is advertised
What is "Distance to Store: Urban Food Deserts"?