Kim Woods Only Please

All social problems in the United States, along with our policy responses to them, are socially constructed; that is, they was created by human beings in previous generations and continue to be held in place by our consent and our failure to act to change them. We as humans are engaged in the social construction of reality throughout our lives, although most people do not recognize this process because they take the reality around them for granted. Whereas human beings who came before us have created all our reality, as with an exception of a few biological and geographic imperatives, as we may not recognize the human origin of our social and economic arrangements because they were reified, or treated as though they exist outside of human creation. Instead, they may seem necessary and even inevitable. For example, as with the educational system in the United States, depending as it does on lectures, absorption of material by students, and reflection back to instructors who will judge performance and offer certification, is a thoroughly socially constructed arrangement that evolved through historical contingency and may or may not be related to real learning. Students, professors, and administrators in social work schools and departments across the country rarely ask such questions; instead they operate within the academic structure with little question and with ready compliance. In all of an institutionalized education, not just social work, it also suffers from this same lack of critical thinking about the utility of our educational practices. In other social institutions, such as marriage, are also socially constructed by law and custom. While it is evident to all who approach marriage in the United States that it need not be a permanent arrangement, many brides and grooms still approach their weddings with what Berger and Luckman called the “reifying shudder of metaphysical dread” that suggests they believe that marriage is a permanent institution existing outside human creation from which they cannot escape. Some of our reifications are seen as not only immutable but sacred, so suggesting revision in them elicits angry opposition. Witness the reaction to the prospect of gay and lesbian marriage in some quarters. Other socially created arrangements, including democracy and the market economy, are not only defended in the United States but also thought to be far superior to other arrangements, a belief that has legitimized their exportation, sometimes under military force, to other areas of the world.

Socially constructed attitudes toward some groups have historically worked to their serious disadvantage in the United States; these social constructions include false narratives about African Americans, Latino immigrants, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals, as well as women. These reified beliefs about group differences were historically fashioned for reasons of social control; for many generations their ongoing viability were supported by the continual process of re-creation resting on the continued assent of many Americans. Only over the past 50 years, has the socially constructed nature of these beliefs revealed and subsequently rejected by others.

The United States social problems are created, by the interaction of our unique historical values and ideologies, our economic structure, and our legacy of discrimination against certain ethnic groups and women. These three factors also inform and limit our policy solutions to these social problems. Without conscious awareness of the powerful role of these factors, we will find ourselves repeatedly replicating the same inequities and failures of previous social policies. Many other countries have an economic system that is can be also characterized as a market economy, where the government control of the forces of production, labor, capital, and credit is minimal and where private economic transactions are more or less freely made and express the will of individual economic actors. The U.S. economic system has produced great abundance at some times, as well as an unparalleled diversity of consumer goods, opportunities for great wealth accumulation, and technological innovation. Yet, as we have seen recently, our economic system has also led to economic insecurity, unemployment, and economic marginalization and suffering for many persons, whose number expands with the cycles of recession and depression. The natural cycles of the market economy and its negative byproducts of unemployment and poverty have been mitigated in many other industrialized countries through the creation of social welfare policies that seek to soften its negative impact. In the United States, a distinct set of historical values and ideologies has limited the number and impact of social welfare policies and served to delay their emergence. In this respect, the United States is unique among industrialized countries in subjecting some of its citizens to unnecessary inequality and deprivation. The third factor that operates to create unique social problems and limit social policies in this country is our legacy of discrimination against certain ethnic groups and women as well as other marginalized groups. Because of this discrimination, those suffering the worst effects of the inequities of the economic system are disproportionately ethnic groups and women.