SOC 3334 - Class, Race & the American Dream

This course explores some of the mechanisms by which economic and racial inequality is produced and reproduced in the United States - mechanisms that inhibit access to the American Dream. We will examine the institutional patterns, structural arrangements, and cultural ideologies that generate and legitimate disparities in the distribution of income, wealth, social status, and economic opportunities across racial and class lines. We'll investigate the complex ways that class and race intersect to produce a system of social stratification, focusing especially on transformations in the nature and pattern of stratification over time.