Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Social exclusion (segregation and social isolation) | Social Inequality | MCAT | Khan Academy

- [Voiceover] Being an integral member

of our society carries with it many advantages.

You can get access to good social networks,

to housing, to educational resources,

to all the different resources of a community.

And with that comes a great deal of opportunity.

But one of the things that can happen

is that certain individuals can find themselves

being kind of pushed, kind of relegated

to the peripheries of society,

and when that happens they really lose,

or are prevented from participating in society in many ways.

They may have reduced rights,

access to legal protection and rights,

they may have reduced access to resources,

and they may have reduced opportunities.

But the thing is, so we have the core society

in the middle here,

but we can also have a variety of different processes

that can drag or suck people away

into the periphery, into the fringes of society.

So one of the important factors here

could be, for example, poverty.

So let's draw the poverty magnet,

and the poverty magnet can literally drag

people away from the core parts of society, to the fringes.

And as we move away from the center

these people are experiencing a greater degree

of social exclusion.

And this is a process by which we are derailing people

from actively participating in society,

and sending people, effectively relegating people

to the fringes of society.

Where they may not have, where they're basically

denied access to many resources.

Another important magnet that we can draw

is the magnet of ill health.

Whether that's mental or physical,

that's a huge magnet.

Again, people who are physically or mentally ill

may have a much tougher time engaging

and interacting in society

and they too may be dragged away

from the core part of society into the fringes.

Also we should bear in mind that certain groups

may face a lot of discrimination.

This could be an additional magnet.

And these groups can face discrimination

based on their race, gender, sexual orientation,

and a whole heap of other different elements,

such as culture for example, or citizenship,

or other preferences, such as politics.

Another thing that we can consider

is things like education, housing, employment,

these are all very, very, very important factors.

And with a lack of education, housing, or employment

people can again, be very easily relegated

to the fringes of society,

where they're not really participating,

or able to interact, network, and gain the resources

that many people in society have.

So as we continue to talk about

this really important concept of social exclusion

one of the things I want you to bear in mind

is that we've drawn these separate magnets,

but in reality people who experience social exclusion,

who are really pushed to the fringes of society,

they often have many

of these magnets combined.

So they're dealing with tremendous forces

that are effectively pulling them away

into the fringes of society.

And when that happens, when people are pulled away

into the fringes of society

there's certain consequences that can happen.

Those individuals may not only develop

greater degree of ill health,

but they may also undertake criminal activities,

because they feel so disenfranchised.

So those are two important concepts there,

ill health and crime.

So as we can see social exclusion

can have many different factors at play

that we need to consider.

There are many different things I want to consider

when we talk about social exclusion

and one factor I want you to consider

is the concept of segregation.

And this concept is pretty important,

because this is a way of separating out groups of people

and giving them access to a separate set of resources

within the same society.

Sometimes people describe this as being separate but equal,

but we know from historic examples,

such as apartheid in South Afric

or the treatment of African Americans in the US historically

that this is rarely true.

Oftentimes people who are segregated

have substandard, or really poor services.

So if we consider our society again,

perhaps segregation would look like this.

One set of individuals would perhaps occupy

only a part of the mainstream and the fringes of society,

and they'd be segregated out.

And segregation may be maintained by things

like laws and public institutions,

or there may be much more informal processes,

or hidden discrimination.

As I mentioned, segregation often affects

a lot of different services and situations,

such as schools, housing,

and historically in the US even where you sat on a bus,

or which water fountain you drank from.

And segregation has often,

often meant racial segregation,

separation based on the concept of race.

Let's talk about another concept

and that's one of social isolation.

And that's when a community may actually separate itself out

from the mainstream

and do so on a voluntary basis.

And they may want to isolate themselves out

based on their own religious, or cultural,

or other factors.

But they want to do that to perhaps

preserve part of their identity.

The Amish for example, may be a group in the US

that you would consider undertaking a degree

of this voluntary social isolation.

And this would be different to social exclusion,

because in social exclusion there are a lot

of external factors at play that force an individual,

or push or pull an individual to the fringes of society.

But social isolation by some of these communities

is often done on a voluntary basis.