The Global Sociology Blog

Sherryl Kleinman and Martha Copp, Denying Social Harm: Students’ Resistance to Lessons About Inequality, Teaching Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 3, July 2009, pp. 283 – 293.

Those of us who teach undergraduate courses in sociology know how hard it is to fight the pop psychology mixed with mass media culture, individualism and Weberian protestant ethic (people’s position in life reflects their moral worth) that passes for students’ critical analytical skills especially on the topic of social inequality.

In this article, the authors tackle four folk beliefs (defined, following Howard Becker, as conventional understandings that people use to make sense of the world and to act toward it) that get in the way of students’ understanding of the social dynamics and structures of inequalities and their harmful consequences. These four folk beliefs are

1. Harm is direct, extreme and the product of an individual’s intentions;
2. Harm is the product of the psyche;
3. For harm to occur, there must be an individual to blame;
4. Beliefs and practices that students cherish and enjoy cannot be harmful.

These folk beliefs, again, are not surprising but the product of the surrounding culture marked by individualism, pop psychology and religious moralism (that last one is not mentioned by the authors, it is my contribution and I find it a very powerful factor in ignoring and denying the social).

So, students readily understand interpersonal racism (and find it distasteful) but have a hard time grasping institutional racism and discrimination. They tend to completely deny sexism and are on the fence  on homophobia, probably less because of religious reasons but because of the ick factor. It is harder to understand how social structures and institutions produce and reproduce inequalities with harm socially inflicted upon entire categories of people. What students understand is "bad people do bad thing for psychological reasons" or "stupid / immoral people are stuck at the bottom of the social ladder because of their own shortcomings".

Similarly, students have a hard time understanding the notion of social privilege or the fact that they, themselves, might be the recipient of unearned privileges precisely because other people are disadvantaged. They will often argue that they, personally, are not privileged. Or, as the authors mention, they will come back with false parallels (black people can be racist too). And if the social context cannot be totally evacuated through blame or "psychologization", then, students will often perceive that their sociology instructor brings it up to excuse immoral behavior.

So what do we do? The authors conclude their article with a bullet point list of recommendations for teaching to tackle these four folk beliefs but these are so general to be largely useless (example "shift students’ focus away from "good people" vs. "bad people" to the unintended consequences of specific social practices for reproducing or challenging inequality", well, duh, but that does not really help as to HOW one accomplishes that AND, this is as much the expected outcome as the process).

The second weakness of this article, for me, was the fact that the authors go through the first two folk beliefs with an almost exclusive focus on gender and not a word on social class.

Finally, too often, the explanation for students’ resistance to social explanations of inequality relies on "conceding the existence of the social nature of inequality would shatter the students’ image of themselves as "good people"". This seems a bit weak tea and a soft persistence of pop psychology (it’s about self-esteem, the catch-all American category). I would argue that it has more to do with bringing to the fore structures of power and questioning them. These structures are not meant to be exposed and irritation would seem the normal reaction. Unpacking this stuff is not pretty.

So, good premise but unsatisfactory execution.