The Pearl- Is Your Social Class Predestined

Research Essay

Saying your social class isn’t predestined is like saying the richest man in the world’s children are going to live in poverty, if you’re born rich you’re going to stay rich. Statistics have proven that if you come from poverty there’s a 96% chance you won’t become a high earner. Your social class is predestined and laid out for you long before you’re born. For instance take the caste system used in India for hundreds of years. If you were born into a certain caste (like a social class) you can not move up in the caste system and only make the income allowed in your caste no more or no less.

Many examples of predestined fate are shown in pop culture,movies, and especially books. This year we read a book titled “The Pearl” which portrays a poor native family living on an island near Mexico. His people were socially oppressed by upper society’s demeaning attitude towards his race and can’t get a job in the city so his people use their coastal resources to make income and in the man (Kino’s) case, selling pearls. Kino’s son got bit by a scorpion and his wife said “the doctor will not come” because they were so oppressed that a doctor would not come to save their baby because of its race. Kino also said, “And in the incandescence of the pearl the pictures formed of the things Kino's mind had considered in the past and had given up as impossible. In the pearl he saw Juana and Coyotito and himself standing and kneeling at the high altar, and they were being married now that they could pay. He spoke softly, "We will be married – in the church."

(3.9-12) Kino is baffled by the idea that he could get married because in his town that idea was not even a possibility. Kino was predestined anyway even from the pearl buyers deception of him and his race and especially the catholic church’s insistence that no one should step out of their position in society. So in correlation, if you were born in that race you’re destined to be in the same social class as all of the ones before you, there was no way you could become a high earner or leave that class simply because of their race and their ancestors.

Another pop culture example is a movie we watched titled “Australia”. This movie is showing the country of Australia’s aboriginal people and how they were oppressed by society. If you were born aboriginal your social class is most definitely predestined because no one would ever give you a job and you would follow your cultural customs. However if you were born white and in a working family then you would follow in your parent's path. If you take Nullah for an example, an aboriginal boy who lives in the wilderness where his people have for thousands of years. He says “I am not black fella, I am not white fella” He is not even recognized as a person to society so therefore his social class was predestined thousands