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2:30am July 7, 2014
Anonymous asked: An individual person can be racist, ableist, sexist, etc. because their beliefs generally stem from the institutionalized belief being taught or ingrained in their mind, rather than it just being a random opinion with no root (I think).

neurodiversitysci:

Thanks for explaining this. It seems like the crucial variable is where the belief comes from—the dominant culture or elsewhere. 

I imagine this would be hard to track sometimes in practice, though?  Because I doubt there are many random opinions with no root out there, and there’s a lot of places in a culture that a belief can come from. At least here in America, which is very heterogeneous, there’s the dominant culture…there are many subcultures that vary in power and in distance from the dominant culture…and there are opposition beliefs, which can come from within and without. For example, there are people shut out of the dominant culture who reject its beliefs, but there are also people who grew up in the dominant culture who reject and rebel against it. (And they vary in degrees of seriousness, too, with some of them just trying to assert their individuality and spite their parents, and others more invested in justice and things like that, and some caring about both at the same time). And then there are people who grew up in a very not-privileged subculture who want to be part of the dominant culture and think in some ways like people from the dominant culture. I guess with certain -isms it’s kind of obvious whether a belief is institutionalized or not (e.g., “disabled people are less than everyone else” is institutionalized, but “abled people are less than disabled people isn’t).  But if institutionalized belief is a larger theory that goes beyond explaining things like why prejudice against women is sexism and prejudice against men isn’t?  And if we’re supposed to apply it in practice to specific people and their beliefs?  It must get complicated pretty fast. 

Um…this started out as a question about how to tell whether a belief is institutionalized or not in practice, and it turned into a long ramble about the complexity of culture and the difficulty of telling a person’s relationship to institutionalized power structures just by looking at them.  Sorry about that.  And sorry for the delay in replying, too.  I tend to delay responding to posts that require too much thought to answer immediately. :( 

Notes:
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