Social Class and Death

Tragic events often dramatize how individuals' social class determines where, when, and how they die. Class-based stratification systems—determined by one's location within the hierarchies of economic affluence, social prestige, and bureaucratic authority—are one of the most potent determinants of occupation, lifestyle, beliefs, and social opportunities in capitalist societies.

Two such examples of tragic events exemplify the connection of social class and death. Out of the approximately 1,400 passengers on board the Titanic in 1912, 535 survived that fateful April night in the cold waters of the north Atlantic. Survival rates were not an equal opportunity. Among first-class passengers, 36#x0025; perished, compared to 61#x0025; of second-class passengers and 73#x0025; of third-class passengers. The crew fared badly as well, with only 22#x0025; surviving.

Ninety-three years later, when Hurricane Katrina pounded and flooded New Orleans, the poor living beneath the waterline, in precincts below sea level, once again perished disproportionately. The evacuation plan was based on people driving out of New Orleans. However, 35#x0025; of black households did not have access to a car, compared to 15#x0025; of whites. Media images of unattended corpses lying in the streets conjured images of third world ghettos. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Americans came to know the names, occupations, and final messages of the victims, many of whom were in upper-middle class professions. In the same time frame, Katrina's poorer victims remained nameless, faceless souls warehoused in morgues.

One of the greatest inequalities of life is how much of it one has. In other words, the rich not only have qualitatively better lives, but quantitatively more as well. In 2005, the income gap between America's haves and have-nots reached levels not seen since before the Great Depression, with the top 300,000 individuals earning more than the bottom 150 million combined. Concurrently, although the overall U.S. death rates have declined substantially in the past few decades, the gap between socioeconomic groups has widened. And it was large to begin with. In 1986, for every 1,000 white males age 25 to 64 with incomes of less than $9,000, there were 16 deaths, 6.7 times more than the 2.4 deaths occurring among their counterparts earning $25,000 or more. Among black males, the rates per 1,000 were 19.5 and 3.6 deaths, respectively, for the lower and higher income groups. These inequalities of ratios of mortality rates more than doubled since 1960.

Such death inequity is not unique to the United States nor to modern times. When Tolstoy's terminally ill high court judge Ivan Ilyich inquired how the peasants die, one inference was their greater familiarity with death. In fact, the very genesis of stratification ideas may have derived from observed differences in the death rates of different social groups. Early Egyptian priests undoubtedly had reinforced beliefs about their special station in life when observing those tending the flooded rice fields, workers crippled and short lived, owing to schistomiasis and other aquatic parasites infecting their bodies. In Plagues and Peoples, historian William McNeill hypothesized that the Indian caste system developed as Indian civilization encountered disease as they incorporated the “forest people,” resulting in strict separation of groups and taboos against physical contact.

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