The Impact Of Social Inequality In Society

Fischer et al. (1996), mainly focused trying to point out how social inequality is socially constructed, which means that it is a man-made invention rather than being something that is determined by nature (Grusky & Weisshar, 2014). This concept emphasizes that man-made social forces are what determines the inequality within a society. For example in the United States, one of the major determents of social inequality is race. The race of a person is something that society has created in order to determine the classification of a person. According to Healy (2011), the term race can be defined as “biologically, an isolated, inbreeding population with distinctive genetic heritage. Socially, the term is used loosely and reflects patterns of inequality

The reason for this research was because Saperstein and Penner (2012) believed that even though that a person may have Afrocentric feature he or she can still be reclassified by its society or themselves after they manage to reach a better social position. In order to answer the question if the race of an individual can change over time the researchers used several analytical approaches. As an illustrative sample, the researchers used data from a 1979 group of the “National Longitudinal Survey of Youth” (NLSY), which consisted of “12,686” American women and men who had the age of fourteen to twenty-two during their interview (Grusky & Weisshar, 2014 p.689). According to Saperstein and Penner (2012), the NSYL is a long-running panel that would take repeated information of the race of an individual each year. The race on an individual was primarily assessed by an “interviewer” who would classify the person as “black,” “white,” or “other” depending on the answers that he or she responded during the “survey interview” (Grusky & Weisshar, 2014 p.689). In addition, Grusky and Weisshar mention that, “[the] respondents were also asked to self-identify their ‘origin or descent’ in 1979 and their ‘race or races’ in 2002 (2014 p. 689). So, the responder would self-identify its race along with

690-692). Furthermore, the authors of this work pointed out that the changes of a person’s race should not be seen as permanent because, the individual can shift from one race to another (Saperstein & Penner, 2012). It all just depends on the life events that the person goes through which shapes the racial perception of the individual and how he or she is identify themselves. So, this results support the ideology of Saperstein and Penner (2012) in which it mentions that race should not be seen as something that is attributed at “birth” and “fixed,” rather as something that can change overtime due to the social position in which the person