American Left

Years ago, I took a sociology course in which we were taught how social class was determined by looking at a mix of family wealth, income, occupation and education. We were taught that those categories were often impacted by complex disparities in opportunity determined by race and gender. Societies, we were taught, are stratified into class categories of upper, middle and lower, but those are often further divided into as many as six or seven groupings. At the time I could not imagine how these multiple divisions could be of much use. I still can’t. It was not until I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that those bewildering categories were cleared up. In one scene, King Arthur, dressed in white, interacts with two very busy peasants, a man and a woman, both dressed in mud. The apparently confused king asks the peasants who owns the castle on a nearby hill.