L&C Ch 15 and Ch 11, Reading for June 29th

According to Ray Suarez in “Holding Up a Mirror to a Classless Society,” classless society doesn’t still disappeared on today. The important indication of the author in this reading is that class society is represented even in the mass media by reflecting conflict and different opinions of classes and sometimes reporting favorably for high class. (363, 364) As example of this situation, people are unjustly treated according to their race, especially black men by relating with problem about crime without exactly judging the truth. (361, 362) As well as existence of class according to race, degree of wealth can be a factor to occur inequality in a society as “there is a corollary in the economy of images presented by television: with less money comes less ability to control the gaze of others, less ability to control self-representation, less ability to block the unwanted gaze.” (362) Like this, according to diverse factors causing existence of class, people in high class usually have more opportunity and better recognition than people in low class (362). Thus, it is still hard to realize classless society on today; rather although exact boundary to distinguish class is invisible on today when compared with the past, the depth is more serious than the past from diverse standards such as race, wealth, education, and occupation. As well as above article, Erik Olin Wright in “Logics of Class Analysis” also explains about existence and formation of class through diverse methods such as “individual attributes” that explain class position caused by individual effort and environment regardless of social context related with other people, “opportunity hoarding” that explains divide of class caused by limitation of social opportunity for certain group of people against the other, and “domination and exploitation” explains that formation of class from social and economic relationship between people through the means of production (345). As the author indicates from above two reading, existence of class is the problem that our society should solve because as long as class exists in a society, inequality between people won’t be continuously disappeared.