Social issues — C2

By B2 you owned the everyday vocabulary of social issues — inequality, race, gender, class. At C1 you added policy debate vocabulary and the rhetorical register of opinion writing. At C2 you cross into the discourse where critical social theory, empirical sociology, and US-specific policy frameworks are taken apart in detail. You can read a New York Review of Books essay on Tommie Shelby, a Boston Review feature on epistemic injustice, a ProPublica investigation of redlining’s modern echoes, an Atlantic piece on the racial wealth gap, a Brookings policy paper on the persistence of ZIP-code-determined opportunity, and an American Sociological Review article on intergenerational mobility — without translation drag and without missing the theoretical or policy subtext.

The vocabulary in this lesson sits at the intersection of critical theory, empirical sociology, policy analysis, and contemporary movement vocabulary. It is the working language of sociology faculty, policy analysts at Urban Institute and Brookings, journalists at ProPublica and The Marshall Project, and the broader long-form political-essay ecosystem (Dissent, Jacobin, N+1, The Drift, Liberties, The Point).

A pragmatic note: this is the most politically loaded vocabulary in the course. Word choice signals not just precision but allegiance. Structural racism vs systemic racism vs institutional racism mean similar things but have different histories and connotations. Equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome mark long-standing political fault lines. Diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and anti-racism have entered both technical and political registers. C2 means choosing terms deliberately, recognizing the lineage behind each, and reading the choices others make.

Frameworks of inequality — the theoretical scaffolding

Class and stratification

• stratification — the layering of social positions
• social class — economic and cultural position; sociologically theorized differently by Marxists, Weberians, Bourdieusians
• the class structure
• upper class / upper middle class / middle class / working class / lower class / the poor / the underclass
• the professional-managerial class (PMC) — Ehrenreich-Ehrenreich coinage, now widely used (often pejoratively)
• the credentialed class / the laptop class / the knowledge worker
• the precariat (Standing) — those in precarious labor
• bourgeois / bourgeoisie — Marxist class category
• petite bourgeoisie / petit bourgeois — small-property owners
• proletariat — wage laborers
• lumpenproletariat — Marx’s term for the underclass
• the new working class
• cultural capital (Bourdieu) — non-economic resources (education, taste, manners) that confer advantage
• social capital — network resources
• symbolic capital — prestige and honor
• habitus (Bourdieu) — internalized dispositions shaped by class position
• doxa (Bourdieu) — the taken-for-granted of a field
• the field (Bourdieu) — structured social space
• distinction (Bourdieu) — class signaling through taste

Race, gender, and intersection

• race — socially constructed but materially consequential
• racialization — the process of being assigned racial categories
• racial formation (Omi and Winant) — sociohistorical process of race-making
• white supremacy — broad systemic dominance, beyond individual prejudice
• anti-Blackness — specific structural antagonism against Black people
• whiteness / whiteness studies — analytical category
• white privilege (McIntosh) — unearned advantages
• white fragility (DiAngelo) — defensive responses to challenges; the term and the framework are contested
• white guilt / white shame / white tears — affective vocabularies
• white flight — historical residential pattern
• passing — being read as the dominant racial category
• colorblindness / colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva) — racial inequality reproduced through facially race-neutral means
• microaggressions (Sue) — small slights signaling racial subordination
• macroaggressions — explicit racial harms
• dog whistles — coded racial appeals (López’s Dog Whistle Politics)
• the model minority myth — selective narrative about Asian Americans
• Black exceptionalism — analytical view positioning Blackness as paradigmatic
• Afro-pessimism — Wilderson, Sexton; race as antagonism without resolution
• abolition / prison abolition / police abolition — movement and framework
• abolitionist — adherent of those frameworks
• decarceration — reducing incarceration short of abolition

Intersectionality

• intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991) — overlapping axes of oppression cannot be analyzed as additive
• intersectional analysis / intersectional feminism
• interlocking oppressions (Combahee River Collective) — predecessor concept
• the matrix of domination (Hill Collins)
• standpoint epistemology (Harding, Hill Collins) — knowledge from marginalized positions
• strong objectivity — Harding’s variant
• outsider within (Hill Collins) — the marginalized insider’s epistemic vantage
• double consciousness (Du Bois) — being seen through the dominant gaze
• the veil (Du Bois) — separation between Black and white experience
• second-wave feminism / third-wave feminism / fourth-wave feminism
• white feminism — feminism centering white women, often pejorative
• carceral feminism — feminism that aligns with police/prison expansion
• TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) — pejorative for gender-critical feminists
• gender critical — alternative self-label

Structural and symbolic violence

• structural violence (Galtung 1969) — harms from social structures, not individual actors
• symbolic violence (Bourdieu) — the imposition of dominant categories
• slow violence (Nixon) — environmental harm that unfolds over time, often on the global poor
• necropolitics (Mbembe) — politics of the right to kill or expose to death
• the disposable population / disposable bodies
• bare life (Agamben) — life stripped of political status
• state of exception (Schmitt, Agamben)
• biopolitics / biopower (Foucault) — administration of life
• populations vs bodies — biopolitical vs disciplinary
• necrocapitalism — extension into capital
• the carceral state — the prison-industrial complex
• the carceral imagination — internalization of carceral logic
• the school-to-prison pipeline
• the prison-industrial complex (PIC)
• the immigration-industrial complex

Epistemic injustice — vocabulary from Fricker forward

• epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) — wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower
• testimonial injustice — when a hearer assigns deflated credibility to a speaker based on prejudice
• hermeneutical injustice — when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at a disadvantage in making sense of their experience
• credibility deficit / credibility excess — the unjust distribution of belief
• prejudicial stereotype — pre-judging
• identity prejudice — prejudice on the basis of social identity
• epistemic violence (Spivak) — silencing through epistemological exclusion
• silencing — preventing speech from registering
• testimonial smothering (Dotson) — self-silencing in unsafe testimonial conditions
• epistemic exploitation — extracting epistemic labor from marginalized people
• the burden of explanation — minorities bearing the work of explaining their experience
• epistemic humility — recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge
• standpoint epistemology — see intersectionality section
• epistemicide (de Sousa Santos) — destruction of knowledge systems
• the colonial difference — the cognitive gap produced by colonization
• epistemic decolonization

Performativity and allyship — the contemporary affective vocabulary

• performative (in current popular usage) — done for show, lacking substance; performative allyship, performative outrage
• performative (in technical Butlerian usage, distinct) — see arts-and-culture lesson; gender as repeated stylized acts
• virtue signaling — performing values for social approval; usually pejorative, often from the right
• moral grandstanding (Tosi and Warmke) — academic-philosophical analog
• allyship — solidarity with a marginalized group from a privileged position
• performative allyship — allyship as display
• accomplice vs ally — accomplice does material work, ally signals
• co-conspirator — newer variant emphasizing risk
• the work — internal anti-racism/feminism labor
• lateral epistemology — peer-to-peer learning
• doing the reading
• doing the work
• listening tours / listening sessions
• calling in vs calling out — private corrective conversation vs public criticism
• cancel culture — diffuse phenomenon of public sanctioning; contested term
• deplatforming (in this context) — refusing to host
• no-platforming — refusing to allow speech
• the heckler’s veto — speech suppressed by audience disruption
• safe space — environment protected from certain speech
• brave space — space for difficult conversations
• trigger warning / content warning / content note
• the discourse — current public conversation, often used ironically (the discourse on X is bad)

Mobility, opportunity, and the American dream

• social mobility — movement between social positions
• intergenerational mobility — across generations
• intragenerational mobility — within a life
• absolute mobility — doing better than one’s parents (declining sharply in US)
• relative mobility — moving up the distribution
• the American dream — the belief that hard work yields advancement
• the Horatio Alger story — the rags-to-riches narrative
• the great compression — post-WWII narrowing of inequality
• the great divergence — post-1980 inequality growth
• the great Gatsby curve (Krueger) — countries with higher inequality have lower mobility
• stickiness at the top and bottom — limited mobility out of high or low quintiles
• the rags-to-riches story as exception, not rule
• opportunity hoarding (Tilly) — restricting access to advancement
• the meritocracy / the meritocratic ideology
• the meritocracy trap (Markovits) — meritocracy as self-perpetuating elite reproduction
• credentialism — credentials as gatekeepers
• assortative mating — partnering with similar education/income
• the marriage gap / the marriage premium
• the family-structure debate
• the Moynihan Report (1965) — controversial document on family structure
• the Coleman Report (1966) — schools matter less than family

The opportunity literature

• the Chetty papers — Raj Chetty et al.; landmark mobility research
• the Opportunity Atlas — Chetty et al.’s neighborhood-level mobility maps
• the moving-to-opportunity studies (MTO) — quasi-experimental relocation research
• the rolling-relocation effect
• the place effect — neighborhood’s causal contribution
• ZIP-code destiny — health and opportunity tracking with ZIP code
• the bandwidth tax (Mullainathan, Shafir) — cognitive cost of poverty
• scarcity as an explanatory framework
• the marshmallow test debate — the original studies do not replicate as initially claimed
• the heritability of outcomes — controversial vocabulary; genetic vs environmental contributions
• the Bell Curve debate — Herrnstein-Murray 1994; widely discredited but still cited
• the ability hypothesis vs the resources hypothesis — competing accounts of gaps

The racial wealth gap

• the racial wealth gap — the persistent gap in net worth between Black/Hispanic and white households
• wealth vs income — accumulated vs flow
• net worth — assets minus debts
• the median wealth ratio — typically ~8-10:1 white-to-Black
• generational wealth — inherited wealth and its compounding
• wealth-transmission mechanisms — inheritance, gifts, parental support
• the inheritance premium
• the downpayment gap — Black households less able to make home down payments
• the homeownership gap — homeownership rate differences
• redlining (1930s HOLC) — federally sanctioned racial exclusion from mortgage credit
• the redlining maps — original HOLC maps and modern equivalents (HMDA data analysis)
• predatory lending / subprime mortgages
• the foreclosure crisis (2008) — disproportionate Black/Hispanic losses
• gentrification — neighborhood transition often displacing existing low-income residents
• displacement / involuntary displacement
• the affordability crisis
• reparations — proposed remediation for slavery and its successors
• the case for reparations (Coates 2014)
• HR 40 — the recurrent congressional bill for a reparations commission

Education, jobs, and the opportunity infrastructure

• the achievement gap / the opportunity gap (the newer framing emphasizes structural causes over student/family deficits)
• the test-score gap
• the school-funding gap
• the digital divide
• the broadband gap
• the homework gap
• summer learning loss / the summer slide
• tracking — placing students in different ability groups
• detracking
• chronic absenteeism
• the dropout crisis
• postsecondary attainment
• college access vs college persistence vs college completion
• the college-completion gap
• the credentials gap
• wage premium / the college wage premium
• the diploma divide — political alignment by college education
• the skills gap — contested concept of mismatched labor supply and demand
• the great resorting — geographic clustering of educated workers
• labor-market discrimination
• audit study — paired-applicant resume study testing for discrimination
• the callback gap

Health, housing, and place

• healthcare disparities / health inequities — see health lesson
• social determinants of health (SDOH)
• food deserts / food swamps
• environmental justice — equity in environmental exposures
• environmental racism — disproportionate environmental burdens on people of color
• NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) / YIMBY (Yes In My BackYard) — housing-politics vocabulary
• exclusionary zoning — single-family-only zoning that limits density
• inclusionary zoning — requiring affordable units in new development
• upzoning / downzoning
• mixed-income housing vs deconcentration of poverty
• transit-oriented development (TOD)
• gentrification — see racial wealth gap section
• the rent burden — housing cost above 30% of income
• severely rent-burdened — above 50%
• the eviction crisis
• the eviction filing
• housing-first — the policy approach
• chronic homelessness vs transitional homelessness

Cultural appropriation vocabulary

• cultural appropriation — adoption of elements of a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, especially in contexts of unequal power
• cultural exchange vs cultural appropriation — contested distinction
• cultural assimilation — minority adoption of dominant culture
• acculturation — mutual cultural exchange (sociology term)
• commodification of culture — cultural elements rendered as commodities
• ethnic adornment / costuming
• the wig debate / the cornrows debate / the kimono debate — specific recurrent cases
• the appropriation-appreciation debate
• representation vs misrepresentation
• stereotypes / counter-stereotypes

AmE-specific vs international vocabulary

Collocations

• deepen / entrench / cement / dismantle / chip away at inequality, segregation
• reproduce / disrupt / inherit / transmit privilege, disadvantage, advantage
• mobilize / organize / coalesce / fracture / splinter a movement
• center / decenter / foreground / background / marginalize / efface an identity, experience, voice
• interrogate / unpack / problematize / trouble / complicate an assumption
• call in / call out / hold accountable / name and shame
• do the work / show up / hold space
• dismantle / abolish / defund / reimagine / reform
• invest in / divest from / pull out of
• redline / reverse-redline / undo redlining
• gentrify / displace / be priced out of
• price out / rent-burden / cost-burden
• track / detrack / sort / re-sort
• gate-keep / gate-open / open the gates

Phrases and locutions

• the long shadow of slavery / Jim Crow / redlining
• the legacy of
• the afterlife of slavery (Hartman)
• structural / systemic / institutional racism
• the wages of whiteness (Roediger)
• the price of the ticket (Baldwin)
• the talk — the conversation Black parents have with their children about police
• driving while Black / shopping while Black / Black tax
• the n-word — meta-vocabulary for the slur
• the c-word / the f-word (homophobic) / the r-word — meta-vocabulary
• the model minority myth
• the bootstraps myth / pull yourself up by your bootstraps
• the trickle-down myth
• the welfare queen myth (Reagan-era racial coding)
• the missing-stair problem (Cliff)
• the leaky pipeline — diversity attrition
• the broken-windows theory — discredited policing framework
• the marshmallow test
• the bell curve
• opportunity hoarding
• the great resorting
• the new geography of jobs (Moretti)

Common Russian-speaker mistakes

1. National meaning ethnic. Major false friend. Russian национальный can mean of an ethnicity (national minorities in the Russian sense = ethnic minorities); AmE national means of the nation-state (national security, national park, national debt). For ethnic groups use ethnic group, ethnicity, ethnic community, national-origin group. National minorities in AmE will be parsed as minority nations, which is incoherent for the US.
2. Ethnic used as noun for a person*. AmE ethnic is an adjective (ethnic food, ethnic minority, ethnic studies); using it as a noun for a person (she is an ethnic) sounds strange and slightly offensive. Use member of an ethnic group, person of X background, X-American.
3. Race and nationality confused*. AmE race is socially constructed but typically refers to broad categories (Black/white/Asian/Indigenous/Pacific Islander). Nationality is citizenship. Ethnicity is descent and culture. The Russian национальность (which historically meant ethnicity) is a common source of confusion: my nationality is Russian in AmE means I’m a Russian citizen; my ethnic background is Russian or I’m of Russian descent means what most Russian speakers intend.
4. Negro / Black / African American — historical sensitivity. Negro is archaic and offensive in AmE except in narrow historical contexts (the United Negro College Fund, retained for historical reasons). The current preferred terms are Black (often capitalized in current US press style) and African American (sometimes preferred in formal/institutional contexts). Russian academic writing has historically used negr / negroid; never carry this over into English.
5. Discriminate as positive*. AmE discriminate in social-issues context is overwhelmingly negative (they discriminated against the candidate); the neutral making distinctions sense survives in a few set phrases (a discriminating palate, discriminate among options). The Russian дискриминация maps to the negative; различать maps to the neutral. Don’t use discriminate neutrally in social-issues writing.
6. Tolerance used over-broadly*. AmE tolerance in social-issues vocabulary has both a fading positive sense (religious tolerance) and increasing criticism (Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: tolerance implies the tolerated is undesired). For contemporary affirmative vocabulary prefer acceptance, inclusion, embrace, recognition, solidarity. Tolerance as a virtue is being demoted; reading and using vocabulary current.
7. Privilege used loosely as advantage. Privilege in current US discourse implies structural unearned advantage tied to social position (white privilege, male privilege, cis privilege). For ordinary advantage use advantage, benefit, edge, head start. Using privilege outside the structural sense — it’s a privilege to work here — is fine in older registers but in social-issues writing requires care because the term has been politicized.

Summary

• Stratification vocabulary spans Marxist, Weberian, and Bourdieusian frameworks (cultural/social/symbolic capital, habitus, doxa, field, distinction).
• Race vocabulary includes white supremacy, anti-Blackness, racialization (Omi-Winant), colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva), microaggressions, dog whistles, the model-minority myth, and Afro-pessimism.
• Intersectionality (Crenshaw), interlocking oppressions (Combahee), standpoint epistemology (Harding/Hill Collins), and the matrix of domination structure the contemporary feminist-of-color framework.
• Structural violence (Galtung), slow violence (Nixon), necropolitics (Mbembe), and the carceral state vocabulary describe systemic harm.
• Epistemic injustice (Fricker) — testimonial/hermeneutical/credibility deficits — and epistemic exploitation, silencing, and testimonial smothering define the language of knower-injuries.
• Performativity/allyship/cancel-culture vocabulary captures the contemporary affective layer.
• Mobility vocabulary covers absolute/relative mobility, the Great Gatsby Curve, stickiness, opportunity hoarding, the meritocracy trap, and ZIP-code destiny.
• The racial wealth gap, redlining, generational wealth, gentrification, and reparations form the housing-and-wealth axis.
• Russian false friends: national for ethnic, nationality for ethnicity, discriminate used neutrally, privilege used loosely, tolerance over-positive.

Next theme: Travel and geography — C2 — geopolitics, soft power, hard power, sphere of influence, balance of power, hegemon, global south/north, brain drain, remittance economy.