The sociological imagination helps us develop the skill of connecting our own and others' lives to the wider social context, enabling us to see how social forces shape our lives and choices. We take that approach in this section, linking our lives to larger social forces including social institutions, culture, socialization, social location, systems of power, and intersectionality. Each of these is a foundational sociological concept – an idea in sociology, presented as a term with a definition, that will guide our discussion of social problems. As we discuss these concepts, consider how they shape your own life.
Social Institutions and Social Structure
Each of us interact with social institutions on a daily basis, and social institutions strongly shape our lives in various ways. Social institutions refer to established patterns of interaction or relationships that serve to support society and guide our behavior. Examples of social institutions are family, education, the state, media, medicine, work, and religion. Each of these play a significant role in shaping how we think, what we believe, what we value, and how we behave. Thus, social institutions have a strong influence on our lives.
Social institutions are inescapable even when we feel removed from them. For instance, you may not feel that media influences you – perhaps you feel exempt from the impact of advertising or don't use social media. However, media shapes larger cultural ideas about beauty or attractiveness, ideologies such as how we should form families, cultural expectations such as gender roles, and so on. Media also shapes the beliefs and behaviors of those whom you interact with regularly. Media advertising likely influences your thoughts even if you feel exempt from its power since ads are processed over and over again in our subconscious mind.
Some people feel that the institution of media does not impact them despite the ongoing bombardment of ads, social media posts, and other media in our lives.
"Times Square Billboards" by Matthew Mendoza via flickr is licensed as CC BY–SA 2.0
In this textbook, we will focus attention to social problems of several social institutions, though others will be discussed at various points throughout the text. We have chapters on family, work and economy, education, media, and medicine (the institution tied to health and health care). We will also incorporate discussion on the institution of the state (government, law, criminal justice, and military) despite that it does not have its own chapter.
Social institutions in part comprise the social structure, how society is organized. In society, we have clear patterns of interaction or relationships through social institutions, which is one component of its organization. Another component is social groups and the statuses we assign to them. As discussed in the social identities and social locations sections below, some social groups have more power and privilege in society, whereas others lack it. In other words, we have a hierarchy of social groups according to our social class, race, gender, and other identities. The social structure also involves the roles we are expected to play based on our social identities. The clearest example of this is gender roles, which we discuss below. Finally, culture constitutes the social structure, as it dictates our beliefs, values, norms, and behaviors. We discuss culture in more detail next.
Culture and Socialization
Each one of us is both a product of and a contributor to our culture – we are heavily influenced by our culture, often in ways we do not realize, and we reinforce our culture in day-to-day interactions, our individual expressions, and other mechanisms. Culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, norms, and practices within a large social group.
Cultural values, what a culture prioritizes or thinks is right and wrong, are supported by beliefs that strengthen them, norms that maintain them, and symbols and language so that they can be learned. Additionally, culture involves arts and artifacts as well as people’s collective identities and memories. It also involves traditions or customs, such as types of celebrations for births or weddings or practices during specific holidays. Culture is everywhere, all the time.
In social interactions, we adhere to social norms, various rules, expectations, and standards that are created and maintained in our specific culture. When we violate social norms, we often receive some form of disapproval ranging all the way from a frown to violence. For example, someone trying to engage in small talk with you may ask: “What do you think of the weather we’re having?” A common response might be, “I’m so tired of the rain” or "I've absolutely enjoyed the sunshine." If you ignore the question, you would be violating a norm since the norm is to respond to the question. Alternatively, if you respond with a detailed analysis of meteorology (the study of weather), you would also violate the norm of small talk. These norms and the norm violations are concrete examples of culture.
Other examples of the components of culture are visualized in the image below. As a sociologist exploring a social problem, we might look at how the culture(s) of the participants reflect different values, norms, languages, or laws in order to better understand the problem.
The culture wheel helps us to understand what is common and different in many cultures. For the various components listed, how might that component in your own culture (or cultures) differ from that of another culture?
“The Culture Wheel” © AndreaGrace J. Fonte Weaver is all rights reserved and included with permission
Anthropologist Edward Tyler (1871) was one of the earliest social scientists to define culture, stating that it was “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits” that people learn from other members of their group. In other words, culture is taught and learned. Each us of learns about our culture throughout our lives, from the moment we are born, through childhood and even adulthood. Socialization is the process whereby individuals learn the culture of their society, including cultural norms, values, identities, and more. The process of learning culture is also called enculturation by anthropologists.
Many agents of socialization socialize us into cultural norms, values, and practices. Agents of socialization include both social institutions such as family, education, media, and religion, as well as groups or individuals such as parents, peers, teammates, and coworkers. We are typically socialized into the same norms, values, and practices by multiple agents of socialization, which reinforces dominant cultural expectations.
A Western example of socialization or enculturation is the belief that we must work to earn the right to live. Children are taught from a young age that we must work jobs until we are old in order to afford basic necessities, such as food, shelter, water, and belonging within our communities. This is steadily reinforced throughout adolescence and into adulthood through toys, media, job fairs, career days, and paychecks. In the West we are also socialized into certain norms of interaction such as the norm of small talk described above as well as other norms such as saying 'thank you' when someone holds the door for you, facing forward in the elevator, or not busting out in song in the middle of class.
We are also socialized into our social identities and expected roles attached to them, such as learning how we are supposed to act as girls or boys in Western culture. For instance, family members, teachers, peers, media, and other agents help to socialize people into their gender roles and also help them develop their gender identity (Andersen & Hysock, 2011). Socialization into gender roles begins in infancy, as almost from the moment of birth parents begin to socialize their children as boys or girls without even knowing it (Begley, 2009; Eliot, 2011). Parents commonly describe their infant daughters as pretty, soft, and delicate and their infant sons as strong, active, and alert, even though neutral observers find no such gender differences among infants when they do not know the infants’ sex. From infancy on, parents play with and otherwise interact with their daughters and sons differently. They play more roughly with sons, for example, by throwing them up in the air or by gently wrestling with them, and play more quietly with daughters. They give girls dolls and kitchenettes to play with and boys action figures or toy guns.
Barbie-like dolls have come a long way since the original Barbie, but they continue to be advertised and thought of as "girls' toys" and shape cultural gender expectations and beauty standards.
"A group of dolls sitting next to each other" by Pixabay via Picryl is considered under public domain
Another example is the institution of education: School playgrounds provide a location for gender-linked play activities just described to occur, and perhaps more importantly, teachers at all levels treat their girl and boy students differently in subtle ways of which they are probably not aware. They tend to call on boys more often to answer questions in class and to praise them more when they give the right answer. They also give boys more feedback about their assignments and other school work (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). These are merely a few examples of the ways that social institutions socialize us into gender in ways that may make us feel like gender differences are 'natural,' when they are in fact primarily socially constructed.
Children and Our Future
Gender Socialization Through Children's Play
The text discusses how the types of games that girls and boys play influence their gender-role socialization. Let’s take a closer look at two early sociological studies that provided important evidence for this process.
Janet Lever (1978) studied fifth-grade children in three different communities in Connecticut. She watched them play and otherwise interact in school and also had the children keep diaries of their play and games outside school. Lever found that boys’ games were typically more complex than girls’ games: The boys’ games had a greater number of rules and more specialized roles, and they also involved more individuals playing. She attributed these differences to socialization by parents, teachers, and other adults and argued that the complexity of boys’ play and games helped them to be better able than girls to learn important social skills such as dealing with rules and coordinating actions to achieve goals.
A second sociologist, Barrie Thorne (1993), studied fourth- and fifth-graders in California and Michigan. The boys tended to play team sports and other competitive games, while the girls tended to play cooperative games such as jump rope. These differences led Thorne to conclude that gender-role socialization stems not only from practices by adults but also from the children’s own activities without adult involvement. When boys and girls interacted, it was often “girls against the boys” in classroom spelling contests and in games such as tag. Thorne concluded that these “us against them” contests helped the children learn that boys and girls are two different and antagonistic sexes. Boys also tended to disrupt girls’ games more than the reverse and in this manner both exerted and learned dominance over females. In all these ways, children were not just the passive recipients of gender-role socialization from adults (their teachers), but they also played an active role in ensuring that such socialization occurred.
These two studies were among the first to emphasize the importance of children’s play for the gender-based traits and values that girls and boys learn, which in turn affect the choices they make for careers and other matters later in life. The rise in team sports opportunities for girls in the years since Lever and Thorne did their research is a welcome development, but young children continue to play in the ways that Lever and Thorne found. The body of research on gender differences in children’s play points to the need for teachers, parents, and other adults to encourage girls and boys alike to have a mixture of both competitive and cooperative games so that both sexes may develop a better balance of values that are now commonly considered to be either feminine or masculine.
One way that culture is significant for understanding social problems is because we can examine the problem from different culture's worldviews. Allen Johnson defines a worldview as: "The collection of interconnected beliefs, values, attitudes, images, stories, and memories out of which a sense of reality is constructed and maintained in a social system and in the minds of individuals who participate in it" (2014:180). A worldview is a perception of reality reinforced by people in the culture. Worldviews can conflict, complicating our understanding of social problems as well as what strategies we should engage in to resolve them.
For instance, there are substantial differences between Indigenous and Western (or colonialist) worldviews. The United Nations (N.D.) explains, "Indigenous peoples have in common a historical continuity with a given region prior to colonization and a strong link to their lands. They maintain, at least in part, distinct social, economic, and political systems. They have distinct languages, cultures, beliefs, and knowledge systems. They are determined to maintain and develop their identity and distinct institutions, and they form a non-dominant sector of society." Although Indigenous peoples worldwide are significantly different from one another, Indigenous people, social scientists, and activists agree that there is a common Indigenous worldview.
We’ve summarized some core differences between Indigenous and Western worldviews in the table below. Each worldview defines relationships to wealth and to land, among other components. In the Indigenous view, land is sacred. Generation after generation, people care for the land and are nourished in return. Wealth is shared. In the Western worldview, land is owned or controlled. A major life goal is to accumulate individual wealth. This belief supports the economic practices of capitalism.
Differences Between Indigenous Worldviews and Western Worldviews
| Worldview |
Indigenous Perspective |
Western Perspective |
| Priorities |
Collectiveness (group is prioritized) |
Individualism (individual is prioritized) |
| Wealth |
Wealth is shared |
Wealth is individually accumulated |
| Nature |
The natural world is more important |
Human law is more important |
| Land |
Land is sacred; humans belong to the land |
Land is a resource; it must be controlled |
| Silence |
Silence is valued |
Silence needs to be filled |
| Sharing |
Practice of generosity |
Assumption of scarcity |
| Binaries |
Binaries do not exist |
Binaries are central |
Adapted from “Differences between the Indigenous World View and the Western World View” by Avery Temple, licensed under CC BY 4.0
It is important to understand that not all Indigenous people have a purely Indigenous worldview, and not all Western people have a purely Western worldview. Rather, these are general patterns of worldviews common to many Indigenous and Western people.
To learn more about Indigenous worldviews from an Indigenous person please read the story “What I Learned from Coyote,” and the explanation of worldview “As I had shared with Coyote.” In them, Jennifer Anaquod, Indigenous educator, researcher, and member of the Muscowpetung Saulteaux First Nation in Saskatchewan, describes her worldview through story. Describing the world through story is part of Indigenous culture.
Social Identities
Each one of us is unique. We like to listen to different music, eat different food, learn in different ways, and have different life experiences. Pause for a moment, and consider what makes you a unique person. At the same time, sociologists know that any person’s experiences and life chances depend in part on the social groups they are a member of. How long you may live depends partly on whether you are a woman, nonbinary person, or a man. It depends on whether you are Black, Brown, Indigenous, Latinx, mixed race, or white. It depends whether you are rich or poor. It depends on whether you are straight, lesbian, or pansexual (and so on). It depends on whether you are able-bodied or disabled. And the list continues.
However, race, gender, class, sexuality, or ability aren’t in and of themselves social problems. Instead, the problem is the meaning and value society attributes to these categories. We have socially constructed inequality in our society based on these areas of social location. Some people have power and privilege. Others have less. Power and privilege influence the trajectories of their lives.
These identities and their relationship to power also help us understand social problems in a more nuanced way. Traditionally, sociologists have sometimes explained social problems by using only one dimension of identity – just age, or just race, or just gender. However, these models do not capture the interdependent nature of society and related social problems. More powerfully, sociologists use the concepts of social identity, social location, and intersectionality to begin to explain systemic inequalities.
A social identity consists of the combination of social characteristics, roles, and group memberships with which a person identifies. According to sociologist Allan Johnson, social identity is “the sum total of who we think we are in relation to other people and social systems” (2014:178). Our social identity includes the following attributes:
Social Class
Some social scientists believe that social class is the most important factor in determining how your life will turn out. A social class is a group that shares a common social status based on factors like wealth, income, education, and occupation. Sometimes, social scientists will use the word socioeconomic status (SES) instead of class to emphasize that the classification includes factors related to money and cultural or social factors.
We can see the challenge of class in the figure below, in which a person who is houseless is carrying all of his possessions, near a New York store selling expensive luggage. Our class affects our available choices and opportunities. This dimension can include a person’s income or material wealth, educational status, and occupational status. It can include assumptions about where a person belongs in society and indicate differences in power, privilege, economic opportunities, and social capital. People in lower social classes (the poor and working-class) may experience classism.
A houseless person on the streets of New York walks beneath a sign for TUMI, a store that sells exclusive bags for travel. He carries several bags full of items. How does this picture demonstrate the inequality present in social problems?
No photo credit provided
Social class and culture can also shape a person’s worldview, their understanding of the world. It can also influence how they feel, act, and fit in. It can impact the types of schools a child may attend, a senior’s access to health care, or an adult’s experience of work. The differences in norms, values, and practices between lower and upper social classes also impact well-being and health outcomes (Cohen 2009; Pearce 2020).
Race/Ethnicity
One dimension of diversity we focus on is race, a socially constructed category with political, social, and cultural consequences based on incorrect distinctions of physical difference. Historically, race has been defined using observable physical or biological criteria, such as skin color, hair color or texture, or facial features. Today, scientists understand that the definition of race based on these biological characteristics is both wrong and harmful.
Human racial groups are more alike than different. In fact, most genetic variation exists within racial groups rather than between groups. We see differences in outcomes such as academic achievement or life expectancy based on race. However, these differences in outcomes are due to the racism embedded in economic, historical, and social factors (Betancourt and Lopez 1993), not in biology.
The meanings and definitions of race have also changed over time and are often driven by policies and laws, and this social construction has consequences. People of color (Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous people) may experience racism, a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities (Kendi 2019). Because race, power, and inequality are linked, white people can experience racial bias but not systemic racism.
Ethnicity refers to a group of people with a shared cultural background, including language, location, or religion. Ethnicity is not necessarily the same as nationality, which is a person’s status of belonging to a specific nation by birth or citizenship. For example, an individual can be of Japanese ethnicity but British nationality because they were born in the United Kingdom. Ethnicity is defined by aspects of subjective culture, such as customs, language, and social ties (Resnicow et al. 1999).
While ethnic groups are combined into broad categories for research or demographic purposes in the United States, there are many ethnicities among the ones you may be familiar with. You may hear Hispanic, Latino/a or Latinx as common terms that refer to people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Spanish, Dominican, or many other ancestries. Asian Americans have roots in over 20 countries in Asia and India. The six largest Asian ethnic subgroups in the United States are Chinese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese. If you want to learn more about the complexity of ethnicity for Asian Americans, review this report from the Pew Research Center.
In the social sciences, we often refer to five main racial groups in the US: Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American/Indigenous, Asian, and white. However, there is variation in how researchers and organizations collect data about race and ethnicity. For instance, the US Census defines 'Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin' as ethnicity rather than race, of which individuals may be white or non-white.
The US Census only recently asks you if you are “of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?” Why do you think this might be?
No photo credit provided
Gender
Gender is a social expression of a person’s identity which influences the status, roles, and norms for their behavior. Gender differs from sex assigned at birth, a biological designation usually limited to female or male, which fails to capture the variation in human bodies as there have always been intersex people who do not neatly fit into the binary sex categories we have constructed of female or male. We sometimes use the words gender identity or gender expression to clarify that we mean how someone identifies or expresses their gender, rather than to describe their biological sex. Like sex, gender also exists beyond a binary of woman and man – gender exists on a continuum. People may identify as nonbinary, genderqueer, bigender, woman, man, and so on (Kosciw, Palmer, and Kull 2015).
However, gender is also a sociological concept which refers to the attitudes, behaviors, norms, and roles that a society or culture associates with an individual’s biological sex. Gender describes the meanings attached to femininity and masculinity. Sociologists agree with other scholars that gender is a social construct. Cultures create gender expectations and differentiate people based on those. Most cultures have some form of gender categories, though they vary in number and characteristics.
Because we have social hierarchies around gender or sex and gender identity, we have –-isms that describe the systems of oppression that people in those marginalized groups face. Women may experience systemic sexism and transgender people may face system cissexism (not that the latter term points to the dominant group – cisgender people).
As a socially constructed concept, gender has magnified perceived differences between the sexes. The overreliance on gender as a differentiating force has created limitations in attitudes, roles, and how social institutions are organized. We can see these limitations when we think about who can use which bathroom, as illustrated in the figure below. We see the influence of gender when we look at what jobs we think are appropriate for women, men, or nonbinary people. We notice it when we look at how parenting responsibilities and household chores are divided within families. Gender influences the distribution of power and resources, access to opportunities, and social control, including gender-based violence (Bond 1999).
Gender is both socially constructed and real in its consequences. Depending on your gender identity, you may or may not have access to a public bathroom, or may not be able to use the bathroom safely. Many businesses and organizations have shifted toward a more inclusive approach, designating bathrooms as gender neutral.
No photo credit provided
Gender, then, is a complex construct. How sociologists understand gender changes as we listen carefully to people who don’t fit into binary gender boxes, as well as to those who feel they do fit into a strict gender binary. How each of us 'does' gender also changes as we become more authentically ourselves throughout our lives. In other words, gender develops and is something we 'do' throughout life. Additionally, gender inequities are present in every social institution and many social interactions. Trans people are in a unique position to explain the experience of gender inequity. To learn more, you may watch Paula Stone Williams, a transgender woman, describing how she was treated differently when she transitioned in the TED talk I’ve lived as a man and a woman.
Sexuality
Sexuality, often referred to as sexual orientation, refers to a person’s emotional, romantic, erotic, and spiritual attraction toward another person or toward specific erotic acts or contexts (Flanders et al. 2016). Typically when social scientists discuss sexual identity, they are referring to the self-label that points to the gender(s) of whom someone is attracted such as lesbian, gay, heterosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, and fluid. However, other sexual identities and categories exist such as kinkster, dominatrix, polyamorous, ethnically non-monogamous, swinger, and so on. Sexual identity is different from gender identity or gender expression, despite that both are included in the 'LGBTQ+' acronym. The 'LGB' letters point to sexuality (lesbian, gay, and bi), the T points to gender (transgender), and the Q points to both (queer sexuality or genderqueer gender).
Apart from being a self-identity, 'queer' refers broadly to non-normativity, meaning any sexual identity or practice that is outside of what has been construed as 'normal' and privileged in society. Monogamous vanilla (non-kink) heterosexuality came to be designated as 'normal' while all other sexualities were deemed 'abnormal,' and thus sexuality influences the distribution of power and resources, as with gender, race, and class. However, social scientists and researchers across all fields understand that there is no inherent 'normal' sexuality, and that the normal/abnormal binary is a social construct that reinforces hierarchies of privilege and oppression. Typically when sociologists speak of oppression tied to sexuality, they are referring to the systemic oppression that LGBTQ+ people face, which is called heterosexism (again this term names the dominant group – heterosexual people).
Sociologists, as well as biologists, psychologists, and other researchers, now understand that sexuality exists on multiple continuums. How might this variation complicate the study of social problems related to sexuality?
No photo credit provided
Age
Some people say that age is just a number, specifically the number of years you’ve been alive. As you age, you experience developmental changes and transitions that come with being a child, adolescent, adult, or elder.
Sociologists group people based on their age. Age groups are made up of individuals regarded by society as holding a similar position based on their age. Power dynamics, relationships, physical and psychological health concerns, community participation, and life satisfaction can all vary for these different age groups. For example, baby boomers are retiring. Millennials often value meaningful, purposeful work over just making money. Generation Alpha is a new generation, born after 2010. While it’s too soon to tell how Generation Alpha will make its mark, they will be shaped by global social problems.
Being old is often stigmatized, but it’s not all bad. How does your age change your experience of the social world?
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As each person ages, they experience different life stages. In the youth-focused culture of the United States, getting old can be something to be feared, and older individuals do in fact experience discrimination – the system of oppression called ageism. However, as we look at the smiling faces of the older women in the figure above, we see that getting older can be a positive experience.
Ability
Please take a moment to look at the picture below before we proceed.
Physical ability and disability look different for every person. Can you confidently tell when someone is disabled?
"Disabled and Here," no photo credit provided
All of these people are labeled as disabled. What do we mean when we use this label? Traditional views of disability follow a medical model, primarily explaining diagnosis and treatment models from a pathological perspective (Goodley and Lawthorn 2010), meaning that medical professionals and researchers see the person with the disability as 'broken.' In this approach, individuals diagnosed with a disability are often discussed as objects of study instead of complex individuals with agency.
A social model of disability views diagnoses from a social and environmental perspective. In the social model, the social problem of disability is that society doesn’t meet the needs of individuals with different abilities, not that the people themselves are limited. Thus, the social model centers ableism – the oppression of disabled people – as a cause of social problems, rather than the disabled person. A social model looks at all the social factors that might impact a person’s ability to fully participate in everyday life, not just at a particular impairment as with the medical model.
Identities and Culture
Ideas about and categories that people identify with for social class, race, gender, disability, and so on vary by culture. For instance, defining disability or ability depends on culture (Goodley and Lawthorn 2010). Culture may impact whether or not certain behaviors are considered sufficient for inclusion in a diagnosis. For example, cultural differences in assessing what is considered 'typical' development have impacted the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders in different countries. Culture may influence how people talk about their symptoms (Office of the Surgeon General, Center for Mental Health Services, and National Institute for Mental Health 2001). Additionally, many cultures across the world did not construct a binary understanding of gender limited to two categories, but rather constructed three, four, or even more genders. Whereas in Western culture sexuality came to be constructed as what someone is rather than what someone does, this was not the case in many other cultures around the world (until Western ideas dominated there). In US culture the racial category 'white' was originally constructed to exclude groups we now understand as 'white' including Italian, Irish, or Jewish. Thus, the experience of culture can significantly impact the lived experience of individuals diagnosed with a disability, who have been deemed 'abnormal' or inferior by way of sexuality or gender, and who are not considered in the dominant group such as in the category 'white.'
These core social identities, along with the culture in which you live, influence how you experience the world. They may change over time or stay the same. There may be other social identities that matter to you. Now that you have this basic understanding of the most important dimensions of social identities, we can explore why social identity matters in social problems.
Social Location and Systems of Power
Describing just one characteristic of a person’s identity is insufficient to understand them. Similarly, understanding any social group requires understanding their complex experiences. For this, we turn to the concepts of social location, systems of power, and intersectionality.
Social location refers to the combination of factors including gender, race, social class, age, ability, religion, sexuality, nationality, and so on, in relationship to power and privilege (Brown et al. 2019). In other words, each area of social location places us in a social hierarchy of privilege and oppression, because the culture has constructed social hierarchies for gender, race, class, and so on.
In the chart below, people with characteristics on the right side, such as white, able-bodied, and middle-class have more power and privilege. Power is the ability to sway the actions of another actor or actors, even against resistance. Privilege is “an advantage that is unearned, exclusive to a particular group or social category, and socially conferred by others” (Johnson 2018:148). The group with power and privilege is referred to as the dominant group.
Non-dominant, or marginalized groups, are located on the left side of the chart, such as working-class, LGBTQ+, or elderly people. Marginalization is a process of social exclusion in which individuals or groups are pushed to the outside of society by denying them economic and political power (Oxford Reference 2022). People in marginalized groups have less access to power. A similar concept is oppression, or systemic and institutionalized obstacles that people in marginalized groups face. In the section above, we named the systems of oppression that people in marginalized groups face such as classism, racism, and heterosexism.
Oppression may involve individual or institutional discrimination, though sociologists typically emphasize the latter. Individual discrimination refers to the denial of rights, privileges, or opportunities to members of specific social groups at the hands of an individual person, or discrimination that individuals practice in their daily lives. For instance, someone might refuse to serve a disabled person at a store, skip over a woman applicant for a construction position, make a racist joke at work, or make a homophobic comment to friends. Individual discrimination is fueled by prejudice – prejudice is the attitude, while discrimination is the behavior. More specifically, prejudice refers to a set of negative attitudes, beliefs, and judgments about whole social groups, and about individual members of those groups. Someone can be prejudiced against dominant groups and discriminate against people in dominant groups.
In contrast, only those in marginalized groups experience institutional discrimination. Institutional discrimination is the patterned denial of rights, privileges, and opportunities to members of marginalized groups within social institutions. This type of discrimination does not just affect a few isolated people within marginalized groups, but is discrimination that pervades the practices of whole institutions, such as medicine, work, media, and education. In this textbook, we will see many examples of institutionalized discrimination such as how job applicants with Black-sounding names are less likely to receive call backs than those with white-sounding names, how women are less likely to receive promotions at work than men even in women-dominated fields, and how LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to experience harassment and assault at school than heterosexual cisgender youth.
Together, the system of privilege that the dominant group experiences and the system of oppression that the marginalized group experiences comprise the system of power for each area of social location. Systems of power can then be defined as the systemic privilege and power or systemic oppression associated with social location.
Systems of Power
This chart lists various areas of social location and for each, names the system of oppression and system of power that each group that experiences and the groups who experience them.
"Systems of Power Chart" by Emily Pain is licensed as CC BY 4.0
Rather than only being indicators of your identity, your social location describes the access (or lack thereof) that you have to wealth, status, political power, economic stability, or other social resources. Identities you have that align with dominant groups means that you experience their systems of privilege. Identities you have that align with marginalized groups means that you experience their systems of oppression. Many people experience both simultaneously, as they fall into both dominant and marginalized groups, and one does not cancel out another.
Citizens, for example, have the right to vote, the right to travel in and out of countries safely, and the possibility of applying for federal financial aid to finance school. They also have the right to work and receive government benefits like health insurance, social security, and unemployment. Citizenship itself conveys power to that social group. At the far end of citizenship, we find people who are undocumented, or living in a country without any citizenship rights. Undocumented people cannot vote, legally enter the country, or receive government aid to pay for education. Undocumented people may be deported. Being safe where you live is a privilege. When you lack this safety, you experience a specific kind of oppression called nativism.
For another example, heterosexual monogamous people have always had the right to marry their partner and adopt children, been well represented in mainstream film and children's books, and been considered 'moral' and 'normal' within social institutions such as medicine and religion. Conversely, lesbian/gay and polyamorous people have been locked out of the institution of marriage and family, been excluded from the institution of media or portrayed negatively, and been considered 'immoral' and 'abnormal' within other social institutions. The system of oppression that describes this marginalized of lesbian, gay, and other queer people is heterosexism.
Many names of systems of oppression end in –ism, such as racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism. The systems of privilege also have names, often starting with the dominant group followed by the world 'privilege.' For instance, white privilege is one dimension of privilege. White sociologist Peggy McIntosh (pictured below) writes, “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in every day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious” (1989). If you want to dig deeper into these invisible privileges, see White Privilege, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. McIntosh lists many examples of privileges, or unearned advantages, that white people have (McIntosh 1989). The Racial Equity Project adapts her work and defines white privilege as “the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed upon people solely because they are white” (MP Associations 2023).
White sociologist and feminist researcher Dr. Peggy McIntosh began to see her white privilege, which she was previously unaware of, when she examined sexism and male privilege. She wrote an essay to challenge other white feminists to see their own white privilege.
No photo credit provided
However, no one is just Latinx, or just middle-class, or just able-bodied. No one is only white, or only a man, or only low-income. We are all of our identities at once. We all have simultaneous identities by way of class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on. Thus, many of us experience some oppression and some privilege. Those systems of oppression and privilege can interact with each other.
Intersectionality
Today, multidimensional models of power and marginalization are widely used to describe society. Before the twenty-first century, many sociological models focused on only one dimension of identity or location to discuss social issues. These single determinant models focused only on race, or gender, or class, or age alone as the most important explanation for a person’s experience. However, these models are insufficient.
Intersectionality is the idea that overlapping social identities produce unique inequities that influence the lives of people and groups (Crenshaw 1989). Social identities such as gender, race, or class don’t exist independently. Rather, they change a person or group’s experience in relationship to each other. This concept is illustrated in the figure below, where the areas of social location overlap.
In this image representing intersectionality, we can see that various social identities overlap creating intersectional identities for many people. How might your own identities overlap to give you unique experiences?
See photo credit above
Intersectional studies have their origin in the Combahee River Collective. The collective was founded in 1974 by a group of Black feminist women in the United States who challenged how white feminists and leaders in the civil rights movement did not address Black women’s needs. These Black women understood that the oppression of race, class, gender, and sexual identity are interconnected. They argued that we must understand these interlocking systems and work to dismantle them. You may read the full Combahee River Collective Statement.
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The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
Combahee River Collective 1978
Articulated most recently by Black legal scholar and activist Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw (pictured below), intersectionality asserts that race, class, gender, and other social locations must be considered simultaneously to understand any group’s relationship to power and privilege. Crenshaw exposes how gender and race were historically divided into separate fields of study. Because of this division, 'race' ended up referring to the experiences of men of color, the universal racial subject. Meanwhile, in studies of 'gender,' white women are perceived as the universal woman subject. However, we know that Black women have different experiences of discrimination and oppression than either Black men or white women. Crenshaw writes, "Intersectionality is… a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of Black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them" (Crenshaw 2015). To listen to Crenshaw in her own words, you may watch her recent talk which discusses the impact of intersectionality, 30 years after she popularized the term: Kimberlé Crenshaw at the 2020 MAKERS Conference.
Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Black lawyer, scholar, and activist, articulated the theory of intersectionality. How does using the lens of intersectionality increase the transformative power of our analysis and our actions toward social justice?
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Moreover, Crenshaw and other scholars such as sociologist Patricia Hill Collins have advanced the framework of intersectionality to focus on how systems of power interact. For instance, how may racism exacerbate experiences of sexism for women of color? How may the experience of cissexism be worsened by the classist experience of poverty for trans people in poverty? Hill Collins (2000) reminds us that systems of power include systems of privilege as well. Thus, an intersectional framework is also interested in how a system of privilege protects against a system of oppression. How may white privilege protect white women from further experiences of sexism? How may class privilege protect trans people from further experiences of cissexism?
Thus, intersectionality focuses on both how overlapping identities produce unique experiences for us and how the systems of power attached to our identities interact with each other. Take a moment to think of how your identities overlap, and how the systems of oppression or privilege you experience may interact.
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In this textbook, we will use these concepts to frame social problems, particularly in regard to discussing causes of social problems and identifying groups who disproportionately experience social problems. Please return to this page if you see any of these concepts in future chapters and would like a refresher on what the concept entails.
Now that we have introduced several foundational sociological concepts, we turn to classical and contemporary sociological theoretical perspectives.
