7 Introduction

Despite the United States’ founding on the values of liberty, equality, and opportunity for all, elements of American society resemble one of the oldest and most oppressive social structures in human history: a caste system. Caste, traditionally an Indian structure, determines one’s unquestionable style of life regarding occupation, ritual hierarchy, and social customs based on inherited status at birth (Deshpande). The United States is located over 8,000 miles from the location of the original caste system, and yet, traits of an American equivalent of the caste system continue to structure American society and families from childbirth. Through countless versions of race-based oppression in the United States – from slavery to Jim Crow to the War on Drugs to mass incarceration, scholars have observed a “shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States” (Wilkerson). And the persistence of socioeconomic stratification has contributed to the “emergence of an American caste system” (Voegeli) based on social class. The implications of these caste-like elements of American society place unjust burdens on underprivileged American children and restrict their futures and descendants as well.

In this paper, I describe the long-term, caste-like effects that inequality can have on the development of young children born into socially disadvantaged conditions. Much of this course has focused on the sociology of literature, which often features single-scene depictions or unique events representative of a single instance of inequality. But in this paper, I look at the long-term impacts of such inequality and how the instances featured in the literature we read in class ultimately shape the opportunities and outcomes available to disadvantaged children. To do so, I draw from the literature of this class to depict the specific inequitable scenes and feelings that have such significant effects on young, disadvantaged children. In addition, I supplement it with sociological theory to explain this inequality and long-term sociological data to prove its caste-like effects through biological and quantitative measures.

I break my study into two groups of disadvantaged youth: children of color and low-income children. Racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality are two of the most common instances of American inequity, but they are also two of the most heritable, making them conducive to study as caste-like continuations of heritable inequality. While there is a known overlap between the children suffering racial and socioeconomic inequality, I study them each individually, due to the differences in social factors creating the caste-like effects on underprivileged children. In fact, while class can be compared in terms of income inequality, race can also be compared in terms of the level of social mobility it enables, emphasizing the exceptional challenges that low-income children of color face. But much of racial inequality derives from phenomena of mistreatment, misperception, and image, whereas socioeconomic inequality is more consequential of a lack of resources or access.