Shedding Light on the Reasons for Inequality in Stuck in...

In his book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhood and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality, Patrick Sharkey sheds a light on wide range of reasons that contribute to the persistent racial inequality among the American society. He also draws attention to the intergenerational neighborhood effects on mobility level (the ability to move upward, or downward in terms of the economic status, education, and occupation) of the residents of destitute areas. In this extension, I am going to present a study that was done on 14 Bangalore slum communities in India, and highlight the main issues that Sharkey included in his book. In the beginning of the book, Sharkey mentioned the idea that people are usually stuck in destitute areas for multiple generations. The inheritance of disadvantaged conditions same applies with slum dwellers in Bangalore. The study â€Å"Stuck in Place: Investigating Social Mobility in 14 Bangalore Slums† by Krishna found that majority of slum dwellers have liv ed in slum communities, for more than four consecutive generations in the same living conditions. There are myriad of factors that contribute to the noticeable inheritance of disadvantage living, the most notable one mentioned by Sharkey is preference. Since India has a system of stratification as a part of the social structure of the society, the study found that people who live in slums prefer to be in places that share familiar contextual environment. Venturing outside the community borders is not