Social Stratification

Kinship is social relationships that are prototypically derived from the universal human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance. Mating refers to marriage and birth refers decent, but nurturance can be seen as closely related to mating and birth. In the U.S. it is called adoption, but each society has its own definition. Kinship is also a social organization, in which each society decides how it will be organized, what aspects of the ‘human experiences’ …

…like to think so. This aspect of the system is castelike. The various ‘racial’ minorities are endogamous and are given lower collective status than the dominant white majority. American racism has a long history of the observation of social distance (segregation) and ritual pollution (segregated bathrooms and taboos on ‘interracial sex or marriage). This castelike system is even more complicated by the fact that each ‘caste’ may contain an internal class based on stratification system.