It’s Blog Against Poverty day, and that coincides with the unit in my Intro Sociology courses on social stratification.  Coincidence or the divine intervention by Durkheim?  Who’s to say.

I’ve been screening documentaries to show with this unit and ran across, “People Like Us.” It’s a fine film for the intro classes and one I’d recommend for most sociologists teaching at most universities in the U.S.   It’s got some good expert interviews and some amazing footage of rarely-seen people of the upper classes!  And, the story of “Tammy” – a woman who walks ten miles a day to her job at McDonald’s is heartbreaking.  However, the film’s got a fairly pronounced white-suburban bias, or at least, that’s pretty clearly the intended audience.   About the only place that people of color ever show up in the film is in the section on “Bourgeois Blues” about the struggles of the black middle class.   I just don’t know that my students, who are predominantly black and Latino, urban and from poor backgrounds,  are going to relate to the film in a way that’s meaningful for them.     Instead, I’m thinking of either using “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” or “The Corporation,” to provide them with some insight into the current financial crisis.