March 31, 2000

From Sociological Illiteracy to Sociological Imagination

By JUDITH SHAPIRO

At one point in the mid-1980's, when I was teaching at Bryn Mawr College, I started paying attention to a common phrase, repeated like a mantra by students there and elsewhere: "Racism, sexism, and classism." I had heard the phrase so often that I had become quite used to it, but it suddenly struck me as odd.

The terms "racism" and "sexism" seemed unproblematic enough, referring to discrimination based on what we take to be physical differences of one kind or