Throughout history, the treatment enslaved people received and the amount of social mobility afforded them varied greatly, depending on economic and political circumstances. In some societies, enslaved people had legal rights, were fairly well treated, assumed important political positions, and could gain freedom and become respected members of society. Slavery in the United States was very different because of racism and a supposed link between biology and class position. Some sociologist maintain that when slavery was abolished in the United States of America, Southern African Americans entered the second major system of stratification—the caste system.  Not only African Americans are part of the caste system, but other cultures are well, however. Member of distinct families and lineages have restrictive sexual code that was ensured by a belief in ritual pollution, which held that even casual contact, among people from different social strata caused those of higher ranks to be contaminated. If a person from a high social hierarchy has the sex with a member of a lower caste, their defilement cannot be removed. This belief was very important in protecting the integrity of caste boundaries.

In a caste system, rank is hereditary and permanent, and marriage between members of different categories is prohibited. As an ideal type, the caste system is totally closed—status is ascribed, and no matter what they might do to change it, people inherit the social position of their parents. Power is the second dimension of class ranking. Power is the ability to realize one’s will, even against resistance and the opposition of others. There is a difference between personal power—the ability to make decision that affect one’s life—and social power—the ability to make decisions that affect the lives of others. Of course, power can refer to physical force, or the threat of violence by a person or group against others. However, authority, or legitimate power, carries far more weight in the conduct of human affairs. The difference in wealth leads to the formation of classes, which have similar lifestyles, or ways their members consumer goods and express their social worth. Differential wealth also gives social classes different life changes, or opportunities for securing such things as healthy, education, and longevity. We often use the word wealth to mean money, but it is more than just about financial standing.

In advanced industrial societies, wealth includes a person’s or family’s total economic assets. Wealth comes in the form of knowledge, human capital, stocks, real estate, trusts, yachts, and others goods and services are vitally important to class standing. For most people, however, income, which includes money earned in the form of wages and salaries, is the primary economic asset. Suppose you were given the task of helping the underprivileged in the United States of America. How would you go about identifying those are truly need financial assistance? Poverty is about the lack of food, housing, medical care, and other basic necessities. However, if you look more carefully you will see that in United States of America, poverty is also seen as failure, degradation, insecurity, and being at the very margins or even beneath mainstream society, as the term underclass clearly implies. In your assessment of who is and who is not poor, you can take either absolute or a relative approach. Absolute poverty occurs when people fall below a minimum subsistence level and are unable to function as members of society. For example, adults require at least 1,500 calories each day to function, and those who fall beneath this daily minimum may be defined as poor (and at the edge of survival) in absolute terms. Relative poverty is a lack of resources relative to others and the overall standards of a society. So, there is really nothing funny about being poor, especially when people are trying hard and being oppressed.

Since the majority of American have little contact with the poor, where do they get their opinions and “facts”? For many, the answer is that they watch television cop shows, Hollywood movies, and the evening news, or they listen to the talk radio, which daily informs millions of people about poverty and other social problems. Overwhelmingly, these mainstream media focus on inner-city ethic groups as the prototypical poor. According to the media spotlight, the vast majority of the poor are either young African American men or ghetto single moms (with many young children) who are routinely portrayed as preferring welfare to work. Examine the evening news or a Hollywood movie and its portrayal of poverty. Who are the poor and why are they poor? Are these portraits consistent with the government’s profile of the poor, which we now examine? The movie “54” with Ryan Phillippe as Shane 54 shows how a young man desires a more prestigious life, and gets in with the wrong crowd, and then loses everything. It was really sad to see him going from being a bright-eyed young man, with big dreams, to living on the streets wrapped in a trash bag because he was trying to win the affections of a young lady in a different caste.

The World has arrived at a period which renders it the part of Wisdom to pay homage to the prospective precedents of the Future in preference to those of the Past. The Past is dead, and had no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; the Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before. The future not being born; we abstain from baptizing it. For me, less privileged than my fellows, I never seen the future. I say that men who do not live in the present chiefly, but hamper themselves with giant tasks in excesses of alarm for the future, however devoted and noble they may be, reduce themselves to the dimensions of pigmies; they have the cry of infants. You reply, Foresight is an element of love of country and mankind. However, how often is not the foresight guesswork? The doubts of the past may be as nothing to the dangers of the future.