Functionalist theory holds that social inequality is inevitable and necessary for society to function. It functions to ensure that all of the work necessary for the maintenance of society gets done. It does this by rewarding work that is more difficult, more important, or requires long periods of education and training and by ensuring that rewards will motivate the most talented members of society to perform well.
It also ensures that the less desirable jobs will also get done, because some members of society will have no choice but to perform these jobs to survive. Functionalism is an inherently conservative view that emphasizes social stability. Main criticisms of this are that it ignores the role of ascribed status in providing privilege and improved life chances for some members of society and real barriers for others like race, gender, ethnicity. (Lawrence III, 1987, 317)
As has often been noted, classical Marxism encounters difficulties in making race (along with gender) a central aspect of political economic explanations. More recently, however, it has been suggested that some neo-Marxist writers have managed to incorporate these questions with relative autonomy models which, as some commentators note, ironically, may undercut the specifically Marxist character of such analyses. (West, 1988, 17)
The sources of racism are many and varied; racism is not simple moral disapproval of other races or their ways of life. But an important part of racial attitudes treats race as a proxy for culture. It is important to emphasize that even after whites accepted that blacks were not naturally inferior to them it was possible for them to believe that blacks were culturally inferior. White disapproval of black culture as ignorant and immoral is an important part of this belief. (West, 1988, 29)
The racism question is a perennial one in American politics, of....
