'engaging the text' #2 - page 322

I believe that Mantsios spends more time in his text about the classes of America, rather than talking about whether or not the wealthy are exploiting the poor. My opinion about the wealth exploiting the poor is that many “poor” people or low wage people do the work that the wealthy don’t want to do. For example, a wealthy person would not want to be a janitor or a construction worker. Wealthy people would have the janitor or the construction worker just do the work for them without even thinking of them as a real human being and thanking them. I see this a lot, I see work being done, like cleaning out public restroom toilets and the ones that don’t have to clean it aren’t thinking about the people that have to deal with people’s waste or the risk of getting e. coli. The janitors are just trying to take care of themselves, while the wealthy are thinking nothing of these people.

Mantsios is arranging America into classes. These classes are lower class, middle class, and upper class. To me, lower class means low wage, middle class is middle wage, and upper class is high wage. However, Mantsios has his actually “household earnings” that classify the classes of the people in America. He talks about how the middle class in the United States holds a very small share of the nation’s wealth and that households earning from $25,000 to $75,000 are considered middle wage. This means that under $25,000 is considered lower class and upper class earns over $75,000.

My opinion about this text is that it is sad that America is divided up by classes. Our society is not classless. I think this is sad because of the stereotypes of all of the classes. Many people find it uncomfortable to talk about which class they are categorized in. I think this is so because it is one of those situations, which it is really no one else’s business. About the stereotypes, for example, you can be said to wear non-expensive, cheap, hand me down clothes in the lower class. As in the upper class, you would wear name brand clothes, or jeans that cost close to $100. I don’t like the idea of being divided up by class.