Class discrimination

Class discrimination, also known as classism, is prejudice or discrimination on the basis of social class. It includes individual attitudes, behaviors, systems of policies and practices that are set up to benefit the upper class at the expense of the lower class or vice versa. Social class refers to the grouping of individuals in a hierarchy based on wealth, income, education, occupation, and social network. Class structures existed in a simplified form in pre-agricultural societies, but it has evolved into a more complex and established following the establishment of permanent agriculture-based civilizations with a food surplus. Classism started to be practiced around the 18th century. Socioeconomic, racial/ethnic and gender inequalities in academic achievement have been widely reported in the United States, but how these three axes of inequality intersect to determine academic and non-academic outcomes among school-aged children is not well understood. The term classism can refer to personal prejudice against lower classes as well as to institutional classism, just as the term racism can refer either strictly to personal prejudice or to institutional racism. The former has been defined as 'the ways in which conscious or unconscious classism is manifest in the various institutions of our society'. As with social classes, the difference in social status between people determines how they behave toward each other and the prejudices they likely hold toward each other. People of higher status do not generally mix with lower-status people and often are able to control other people's activities by influencing laws and social standards. The term 'interpersonal' is sometimes used in place of 'personal' as in 'institutional classism (versus) interpersonal classism' and terms such as 'attitude' or 'attitudinal' may replace 'interpersonal' as contrasting with institutional classism as in the Association of Magazine Media's definition of classism as 'any attitude or institutional practice which subordinates people due to income, occupation, education and/or their economic condition'. Classism is also sometimes broken down into more than two categories as in 'personal, institutional and cultural' classism. It is common knowledge in sociolinguistics that metasocial language abounds in lower registers, thus the slang for various classes or racial castes. In the Arab Gulf region, Western workers and local nationals are given better treatment or are preferred.