Social Class and Cultural Diversity

Social classes and different cultures are all around us. We experience them every single day without evening thinking about it. When you think about it the people you spend your time with usually have things in common with you like education, resources, values, behavior, and lifestyle. People who don't share these things with you, you usually don't spend time with them. This is how social classes get defined. In class we watched many videos from the television show People Like Us. These videos showed examples of people in their different social classes. One of the episodes that I really thought was interesting was a lady we would assume was "higher" class was instructing a woman in a "lower" class as her to be high class, by dressing her in a "higher" class way and teaching her a few social aspects of the "higher" class. Later that night the both attended an art gallery. It was interesting that at the gallery the "lower" class woman, even though she had all the physical things to fit in, didn't quite fit in because of the behavior differences she wasn't accustom to. Social classes include more things than just resources that we see up front.

Culture can be a variety of things it can be the place where we are from, what religious group we are apart of, the neighborhood we live in, and even within our own family. In our different cultures there are varying things that we do that other cultures would never do and vice versus. In class, our teacher asked, "Are all cultures valid?" The automatic response for almost everybody was yes, until our teacher started bringing up different cultural beliefs like animal sacrifices, polygamy, and other things that go against what we define in the law as right. Are these cultures valid in doing these things or should their be a line drawn? That then rises the question of who gets to draw that line where it stops? This became very controversial in class because cultures are shaped by feelings, beliefs, and experiences that are all valid, but does that make the actions valid? I personally believe that no culture is completely valid. There is always something that could be done better (not better compared to other cultures, but better within themselves). So what do you think? Is everything in your culture valid?