Leith Mullings - Lecture Notes PDF

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Leith Mullings: intersectionality among race, gender and class -

Intersectionality: an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender and class interact to shape individual life changes and societal patterns of stratification

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Harlem Birth Right Project: studied infant mortality and women's health in Harlem! Saw that education and social status influences rate, on top of race 

Influence of housing, employment, child care, pollution, environmental factors, public spaces, parks, grocery stores

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Working-class women: inadequate/overpriced/poorly maintained private & public housing forced them to constantly be on the move! Shortage of jobs also prevented them from having good security/benefits

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Middle-class women: constantly laid off from gov down-sizing 

Resistance: forms of collab! Sojourner syndrome(story of Sojourner Truth: a slave who overcame multitudes of hardship and became an activist): determinism and creativity required to overcome interlocked constraints of racism/sexism/inequality

How are class and inequality constructed? United States national myth tells "classless" society in which upward social mobility is available = "The American Dream" CASE: poor whites in rural Kentucky: 

Privileges often associated with whiteness in the US have been severely limited by class

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"sweat is made to trickle up": surplus value of worker's labor drains upward into the hands of successive layers of elites. Their agonizing work enhances the lives and economic success of others who are already better off!

 CASE: wealth, inequality and wall street: 

New disconnect between what's best for the corporation and what is best for most of its employees

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"new cultural code for doing business" relentless search for more profit and government reregulation of the financial services industry

A look at the numbers: -

Income: what people earn from work, plus dividends & interest on investments, along with rents and royalties (income based on % of money made on book, patent, etc.)

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Wealth: total value of what someone owns, minus any debt

o Even more unevenly distributed!!!!!!!!! People can fake live middle-class because of loans but they collect more and more debt o So stratified!!! White families have accumulated 15x the net worth of black/Hispanic households The roots of poverty:  "Culture of poverty": poverty as pathology o Certain ways of thinking/feeling lead to the perpetuation of poverty among the poor :(  Poverty as a structural economic problem o Hard to break that ceiling / more polarized o No jobs, inadequate education and healthcare, impoverished neighborhoods o Important to acknowledge globalization!!: flexible accumulation and uneven

development What makes class & inequality largely invisible? Consumption!  Experience of middle-class because of loans and debt! Can consume like middle-class Effects of global inequality? CASE: street vendors in the global economy  Informal economy: the underground/illegal system of buying and selling (parallels to ofcial economy)  Cochabamba, Bolivia: thousands of bright dynamic long-term merchants (fijos) and thousands of street vendors (ambulantes) o Tension between groups o Laws against street vendors but inconsistently enforced: making it even more uncertain, insecure and vulnerable CASE: class and circulation of water in Mumbai, India  City provides no legal rights to Mumbai's water for people who don't have permanent/legal residence  Citizens mobilize social capital (friends, employers, siblings, water ofcials, fictive kin)...