Running Head: CYCLE OF SOCIALIZATION 1

Cycle of Socialization Paper

Lee Knight

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

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An occasion I stereotyped, was prejudiced toward, or discriminated against others (1)

When I was a teenager and younger, I stereotyped people living in poverty in this country

as being less hard-working than other people. Even though I never expressed my thoughts to

people in this target group in words or in my conscious actions, I know that we often express our

prejudices in our unconscious actions: the distance we keep from people both physically and

socially, facial expressions, the type of energy we exude, and the invisible walls we erect.

The effect of this stereotype is that this belief very likely kept me from having

meaningful interactions with people belonging to this target group and colored my overall

perception of society in this country. I could have learned some valuable lessons earlier in life if

I had been open to interacting with a larger variety of people. When I was in my late teens, I

experienced a radical shift in my viewpoint due to several factors, but up until that point I feel

that I missed out on a lot.

When I was a victim of stereotyping, prejudice, or discrimination (2)

I have experienced stereotyping and discrimination many times because of my gender,

which is female. Although I have grown accustomed to it over time, it never really gets easier or

becomes less insulting. My father was very passionate about women’s rights as long as I knew

him, and he encouraged my interest in carpentry. When I was in my early-twenties I applied for a

job as a carpenter’s apprentice; the job ad said, “no experience required.” I called and spoke with

the man who posted the job ad and, even though he sounded a bit strange over the phone, he

liked that I had previous experience and said I was hired. When I showed up the next day he

looked me up and down then told me I would actually be doing data entry. After he switched my

job role I knew why he had sounded strange on the phone: he was surprised a woman was calling

about a carpentry job. It seemed that he only told me I could have the job because he was caught
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off-guard and because I did have related experience, but reconsidered once he had time to think

about it.

Another a fact necessary to understanding my experience was that the job was in a very

small town in the mountains of North Carolina. In other words, even in the early-2000’s people

in this town had a very conservative mindset. There were very few, if any, women working in the

construction and carpentry trades in this location. If I had not needed that job I would have told

him that his behavior was completely unprofessional just for my own personal satisfaction, but I

needed the money so I stayed there and never spoke about it. Another man who worked there

also thought it was not right and tried to get me involved in carpenter’s apprentice projects, but

as far as I know he never said anything to our boss and the boss only let him take me out on a

few jobs.

The cognitive consequence of this incident was that I stopped applying for jobs in male-

dominated fields because I’d been socially conditioned to believe there was no point: I was just

going to be stereotyped and very possibly discriminated against because of my gender. Added to

that was that fact that prior to this I had experienced similar behavior on job sites. So afterwards

I was even more reluctant to work with men for quite a few years. Approximately sixteen years

later I still worry that I will be stereotyped and/or discriminated against by men I work with or

interact with socially.

Cycle of Socialization Model (3)

The Beginning

I’ve been aware at least since my late-teenage years that I belong to more agent groups

than target groups. Even though I was not familiar with these terms at that time, I had still
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developed a self-awareness around both the privilege and the disadvantages I experienced as a

result of the social identities into which I was born.

Agent groups. I was born into several agent groups that are afforded significant privileges in this

country: Caucasian, heterosexual, upper-class (raised as starting at age three), physically abled,

and Christian.

Target groups. I was also born into several target groups that are stereotyped and discriminated

against: female, lower-class, and mentally disabled.

First Socialization

To understand how I was socialized, it is necessary to know that my mother and father

grew up in poverty and were very proud that they worked hard from a young age to climb out of

it by obtaining their high school diplomas and pursuing degrees in high education. Even though

they grew up as members of this target group, they thought that their hard-working families were

the exception to the rule. The rule being that most people, especially white people, are in poverty

because they just don’t try as hard as others. My parents believed that because of white privilege,

other white people really had no excuse to be in poverty unless they were one of the few families

who, like theirs, were just victims of circumstances beyond their control. My mother and father

said their parents and grandparents never had the advantage of a formal education, but they did

work very hard on their farms and had simply fallen on desperate times starting during The Great

Depression. They were the first people in their families to go to college and my mother was the

second person in her family, after her sister, to continue in education beyond middle school. My

father used to tell me stories about hitchhiking to his high school and college classes in the snow

because he did not have transportation. My mother told me about having to wear dresses made
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out of feed sacks to school. These and other stories I grew up hearing had a huge impact on the

way I viewed people outside my family unit.

I grew up in Saudi Arabia and would visit my tiny North Carolina hometown in the

mountains for two weeks each year. This town consisted mostly of Caucasian households and

many people lived in poverty, especially in the neighborhood my mother’s family home was

located. One time a little boy who lived up the street came over to play with me, and my mother

made a huge deal over the fact that his feet were covered in mud and dog feces. I never said

anything to him and neither did my mother, but I went into the other room and quietly asked my

mother why his feet were so dirty all the time. Her reply was something very close to, “Because

his family is white-trash and they are too lazy to teach their children good hygiene.”

Institutional and Cultural Socialization

I grew up in a foreign country, so I was exposed to fewer socialization sources than my

parents were because I had much less contact with American institutions. My father worked for

an oil company starting when I was three-years-old, and everyone who worked for the company

was required to live on what was called a compound. The level of pay my father made put us in

an upper-class pay bracket, and everyone who worked for the company made an upper-class

living. In other words, there were no income disparities in the community I grew up in. There

were no homeless people in our community, not a single one, or even a family that struggled to

pay bills. I was aware that people in other places lived in poverty, but since I didn’t routinely

interact with them it didn’t have as much of an impact on me. The only institutions I received

consistent similar messages from about people in poverty were located in the United States, and I

was only there for two weeks each year and had limited contact with the people in these

institutions because of my age. I believe this limited exposure for the thirteen years I lived in
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Saudi Arabia facilitated my critical questioning of how I’ve been socialized by family,

institutions and our culture. I definitely recognize that the process of socialization is not limited

to childhood/young adulthood, but I feel that I’m fortunate to have been exposed to other points

of view during my formative years and that experience has contributed to my growing and

maturing as a person.

Enforcements

Even though I began to challenge my socialization when I was in my late teens, I was

reluctant to say anything that would challenge prejudiced statements my parents and others made

because, as Harro points out in the article, when people from agent groups challenge social rules

they are also subject to punishment. When I was in high school I gave a man who approached me

on the street twenty dollars for gas money. I told the head-mistress of the American boarding

school I went to about it and she became very upset with me. She told me that there was no way

he really needed the money for gas; he would just be spending it on alcohol or other drugs. She

went on to lecture that people who help others by giving them money are fools who perpetuate

the cycle of poverty by allowing people to continue to be lazy by living off others. I told my

parents about the incident and they gave me a similar lecture. My best friend at the time even felt

the same as the adults I spoke with. I felt very naïve and foolish, but also felt conflicted because I

knew even then that you cannot logically assume everyone who lives in poverty behaves a

certain way. I asked myself and others, “What if he really did need that money for gas?” I

seemed to be the only person questioning that stereotype, and the enforcements I encountered

made me reluctant to continue outwardly challenging it.

Results
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Some of the results of my socialization regarding my agent identity of upper-class were:

feelings of guilt for internalizing prejudiced messages and my inability/unwillingness to

inwardly and outwardly challenge these messages, a distorted reality which did not help me

navigate socially in economically diverse environments, and a narrow worldview in general

since poverty impacts every country in the world to some extent.

Actions

When I was much younger, I feel that I helped perpetuate the cycle of oppression by at

first not inwardly or outwardly challenging my agent group socialization. I recognize that I also

helped perpetuate this cycle by not outwardly challenging this dynamic even after I started to

inwardly challenge it by asking myself questions and actively searching for answers. Although I

have a much different mindset now, I still feel that I don’t do enough to outwardly challenge

people who perpetuate the system of oppression in various ways. In light of that concern, I’m

currently working on finding community outreach opportunities to educate the public about

target groups and American societal problems in general. As Harro points out, our inaction

makes us participants by default in the system.

The Core of the Cycle

Fear. I think my parents were afraid to examine their own views closely because they wanted to

believe that they were part of a very small percentage of special people who were able to lift

themselves out of the poverty they were born into because of personal characteristics that made

them better than other people. I was afraid to outwardly examine my own views at a certain point

in my life because of my parents’ and society’s messages and expectations. I was also fearful

because of negative experiences I had, such as the one I discussed about giving a man gas

money.
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Ignorance. My parents were also socialized to think that most people living in poverty were

simply lazy and because of that hardworking families such as theirs were in the minority. This

ignorance as a result of how they were raised contributed to their unwillingness/inability to

question the part they played in the cycle of oppression. They did not even acknowledge that this

cycle existed because to them it was not a cycle but a matter of individual personal

shortcomings. When I was a child and a young adult my ignorance definitely played heavily into

the way I inwardly and outwardly supported the cycle.

Confusion. As the article points out, the cycle of socialism as related to oppression is a very

complicated dynamic. I’m not sure if my parents ever felt confusion about their agent role of

upper-class because they never spoke to me about it. I recall feeling confused on many occasions

and therefore hesitant to outwardly challenge the cycle. I still carry shame with me about my

failure to outwardly take a stand in the past and in the present. I have more often taken an

outward stance against it since I was in my late teenage years, but I feel that there have been

times when I should have done or said more.

Insecurity. I have definitely felt insecure about taking a stand against the cycle. Until I enrolled

in a Bachelor of Social Work program, I had never received any sort of skill-building instruction

for taking a stand. So even though I started thinking critically about the cycle when I was in my

late teens, I didn’t have any formal tools with which to go about it. So outwardly challenging the

system didn’t happen as often until after I became a social work major. I also have a social

anxiety disorder, so that greatly complicated the insecurity dynamic.

Power or powerlessness. The message I consistently heard from my mother growing up was

that if you’ve worked hard to get where you are, it is understandable if you do not want to

challenge oppression because you’re afraid of losing what you’ve earned. Her stance (and my
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father’s stance, to a lesser degree) was that we need to mind our own business, and we can’t

really make a difference anyway so there is no point in putting ourselves at risk of losing our

position of power.

Areas of ambiguity present in my perception (4)

As I discussed earlier, my perception of people living in poverty has greatly shifted as

I’ve matured and as my social class changed from upper-class to lower-class. I dropped out of

college when I was nineteen for a variety of reasons and started living on my own. That was an

incredibly transformative experience because for the first time in my life I was living in poverty.

Although I was born into poverty, I was too young (age one through three) at that time to

remember how it impacted me. My parents told me when I was a younger, for instance, that

people who are lower-class don’t have health insurance because they do not want to pay for it;

they would rather spend the money on something else. When I was older, I explained my

perspective that people very often do not have health insurance because it is widely unaffordable,

and in addition to that people are also widely underpaid. I told them that I understood this

dynamic because I was currently living it. At this point (around 2001) they had been living in

Saudi Arabia since the early 1980s. They were not aware of the fact (or were willfully ignorant

of the fact) that inflation and salaries in many job markets had not increased proportionally to

one another, and therefore the economy had been negatively impacted and was not like it was

when they were growing up and before they moved out of the country.

Direction for Change cycle component (5)

As a result of my perspective shifting, I now recognize that I am biased towards those

who are prejudiced against people living in poverty. I’ve found it challenging so far to work with

people who hold negative stereotypes and discriminate, but I have dealt with this by
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remembering the ways I was socialized and keeping that in the forefront of my mind at all times

when interacting with them. If I can change my perspective, then surely others must be capable

of change as well. I think the fact that I have had two perspectives on people in poverty at

different points in my life is a strength, because I will be able to view clients through the lens of

having belonged to both the upper- and lower-class so I will (hopefully) be able to increase my

ability to empathize with upper-class clients. Moving forward, I would like to engage in mezzo-

and macro-level interventions designed to educate people about the cycle of socialization and

oppression especially as it relates to economic class.

Academic Integrity Pledge: “I have abided by the Academic Integrity Policy on this assignment.”

Lee Knight 05/30/2019

Signature Date
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References

Adams, M. (2018). Readings for diversity and social justice. New York: Routledge.

doi:http://depts.washington.edu/geograph/diversity/HarroCofS.pdf