Insisting on Immunity from Socialization
“I was taught to treat everybody the same.” “My parents raised me to believe that it didn’t matter that I was a girl, I could be anything I wanted.” “That’s not my experience.”
In addressing the claim that one has been immune to the forces of socialization, we offer the following reminders:
Our families are not the sole forces of our socialization. Our families are themselves not free from socialization. We consistently receive many contradictory messages from a multitude of sources. It is impossible not to be affected by these mixed messages. We cannot simply decide that these messages have no effect; it takes conscious and ongoing effort to challenge them. Our experiences occur within a socially stratified society and must be contextualized as such.
Hopefully by this point our readers understand that they cannot be immune from the larger forces of socialization and that they couldn’t avoid having been socialized into groups that are positioned hierarchically in relation to each other.