As a brand spanking new sociology major, I'm in an "Intro to Sociology" class as a sophomore. I think it's safe to say the class is, at the very least, 75 percent first-year students. On the first day of class, my professor asked who had been in a sociology class before. While it seems to be more prevalent than I had originally thought, there were still only a handful in this two hundred person lecture hall.

What I guess I want to emphasize by pointing this out is I find it relatively safe to say, without sounding like a pretentious jerk, that many of the kids in this intro class haven't been exposed to the statistics and realities of the world.

I know I'm seriously one to talk because up until September of last semester, I lived in a perfectly shaped, un-punctured, white bubble of privilege. I didn't grow up in an exceedingly wealthy neighborhood with exceedingly wealthy parents, but I grew up in a predominantly white, upper-middle class neighborhood, went to predominantly white and upper-income schools, and lived a relatively "sheltered" life. I was never interested in the news, and my family never discussed social issues in front of me (maybe at all, it's hard to know for sure), so I was rarely exposed to the things that I choose to learn about now.

I can't blame any of the first-year students for not knowing the things they don't know, as I was just like them. I don't necessarily like to say that I was "ignorant" (only because there's such a negative connotation around the word), but even in my own ignorance I was aware that the way I saw the world probably was not the way it was.

In class, the topic of equal opportunity was broached in our discussion of deviance and social control, especially relating to crime. Robert Merton (a super famous sociologist with a lot of really great theories that I highly recommend you check out) created the concept of "structural strain". The basic premiss is this: our society values economic wealth and the ultimate goal for people living in our society is to have economic wealth. Those that have limited opportunity to achieve economic wealth are subject to trying to find alternative means of achieving economic wealth- the caveat is that most of these "alternative" means are considered criminal, and most of the people with limited opportunity are low-income and subsequently minority groups.

One student in particular did not seem to be "buying into" this idea. Or at least, he was the only one vocal enough to admit that.

"Saying everyone doesn't have equal opportunity is just a cop out for committing crimes, and that's just not okay. If you don't have access to a good education, just pick up a book and read it, there's nothing stopping you."

This idealistic, highly individualized statement is surprising on a number of levels.

Yes, America was created on the basis of the "American Dream", that you have few obstacles and can have many achievements in life if you work hard enough. Maybe when the idea of the "American Dream" was created, there was less systematic and structural oppression. Maybe.

What people seem to be failing to account for, is that the fact that people overcome obstacles means that there are obstacles to overcome in the first place. When you say to me, "look what Oprah overcame and she's successful; if she can do it, so can other black people", what you're really saying is "let's look at this one individual and project her life onto the lives of countless others." Yes, she overcame obstacles, and yes, we should absolutely commend her for it, but her ability to overcome doesn't mean everyone can.

Discrimination in housing and employment is one way minorities receive limited opportunities. In a study by Douglas Massey and Garvey Lundy, they found that race and social class discrimination does exist, even just from the sound of someone's voice. Let me lay it all out for you. 474 calls were made to 79 real estate agencies by Massey and Lundy's research students. Five calls were made to each agency with known apartment vacancies. The callers followed the same script, meaning they: were the same age (25) and marital status (single), had the same number of kids (none), were looking for the same type of apartment, and had similar incomes and budgets. What differentiated them was the way they spoke. The callers alternated between black accented English (signaling a middle-class background), black English vernacular (signaling lower-class background) and American English (signaling a "typical" white person). What they found was that 68 percent of American English, 60 percent of Black Accented English, and 41 percent of Black English Vernacular users were told an apartment was available. That means that those theoretical people with lower-incomes looking for an apartment would be denied one, thus limiting their housing opportunities.

While we're on it, let's talk about employment opportunities. In 2009, Devah Pager conducted a study to see how prevalent employment discrimination actually was. Like Massey and Lundy, all of Pager's testers followed a script. They were all of similar age, height, physical appearance, and interactional style, and they also used similar speaking scripts. Resumes were given out to 340 entry level jobs that were hiring in NYC by the ten testers. The resumes were matched, but not identical. Thirty-one percent of white, 25 percent of Latino, and fifteen percent of black applicants received a callback for an interview. Using this data, a white applicant is fifty percent more likely to receive a callback for an interview than a black applicant, meaning a black applicant would have to turn in fifteen resumes for every ten turned in by a white applicant. As a side note, Pager also conducted a study in 2005 that found that white applicants with a criminal record were still more likely to receive a callback than black applicants without a criminal record.

The results of these studies are the kinds of things people don't know about when they say "anyone can make it if they try hard enough." There are plenty of other barriers that limit opportunity that I could talk about (such as the policy that fifty percent of a school's funding comes from local taxes) but these studies highlight a few main ones.

It's easy to look at people like Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama and say that there is equal opportunity if people just get off their a** and work for it, but what's not so easy is looking at the systematic oppression of minorities and the structural inequalities in society and deciding something needs to be fixed.

I'd like to leave you with a quote by sociologist and creator of The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills:

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

Special thanks to the book "Exploring Inequality" written by Dr. Jenny Stuber for introducing these studies and statistics to me.