Social Stratification & Toxic Solidarity

When we talk about social stratification, we are talking about how people are ranked in society, in addition to their access to social mobility. There are two types of systems — class and caste — and what we learned from <a href="https://youtu.be/bP0m0jKORwg" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Isabel Wilkerson</a> is that we need to utilize our critical thinking skills to see how the United States is organized as both a class and a caste system. Capitalism, as a way to organize the economy, requires there to be both wealth and poverty, and there is a continuum of access to resources in between those two poles. Thus, there is movement in capitalism, but it is limited. One of the main tenets of the “sociological imagination” (Mills) is that nothing is random: rather, all aspects of our society are organized and shaped by the history we’ve inherited and the accumulation of our daily actions. What does this mean in relation to social stratification? It means that who is wealthy and who is poor isn’t random, but requires social organization. <a href="https://mledwards-15.medium.com/social-stratification-toxic-solidarity-890a933ceec6">Learn More</a>