Levels of categorism

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Categorism operate through facets. These facets of categorism can operate on different levels. Ranging from personal micro scale to the global macro scales, as well as ranging from being a matter of how people speak about something to being a matter of structural patterns for how people behave. Failing to distinguish between such different levels, one is likely to proverbially “compare apples and oranges”. Thus making it easier to invisibilize or incomprehensibilize various expressions of categorism. One distinction that can be made is into the following six categories: Individual, group, systemic, structural, discursive and dogmatic. Through the facets, the various foci and abstractions of categorism also operate on these six different levels.

The six levels

  • 1. Individual level refers to the internal reality of what happens within a person. And also to how this is expressed by the individual. This level includes categorism against others as well as internalized categorism.
  • 2. Group level refer to how people interact with each other. Social dynamics on a micro level. Such group-dynamics may for better and worse include building social norms for what views, feelings and acts are socially appropriate, encouraged or even mandatory in the group, and which ones are not. These norms may or may not differ significantly from mainstream society.
  • 3. Systemic level refers to something happening over and over in a pattern that is sufficiently coherent to have effects of its own. Patterns of prejudices, bigotries and discriminatory practices that are common in a culture, subculture or similar. Lots of little things that wouldn't matter if they were isolated incidents but that adds up very quickly.
  • 4. Structural refers to a facet of categorism being built-in into a social structure of some kind. Discriminatory laws, customs, self-reinforcing social expectations, and so on.
  • 5. Discursive level refers to a facet of categorism having been built into how we talk and think about concepts. How the language turns into dichotomism that bends our thoughts, feelings and acts in certain directions, limiting our understanding and locking people in linguistic cages.
  • 6. Dogmatic level refers to a facet of categorism that has been systematized in such a way that it has been built into a cateity or great narrative. Which may be conceptualized as a political ideology, a theological position, a scientific paradigm, or simply “the common sense”. Narrativization can turn into narrativism, and thus narratives can turn into destructive dogmatism that fuels categorism.

Interaction

These six levels are constantly interacting with each other, affecting each other in various ways. For example, a person who holds an certain prejudice or bigotry on an individual level may feel more at home in a social context where this particular categorism is also systemic and structural. He may also feel more at ease with discourses and narratives that reinforces his categorism rather than opposes it.

Even when two cases of the same facet of categorism operate at the same level they may still differ greatly in how deeply entrenched they are in the mindset of the person or social conventions of the group. It may also vary with power relationships: The same categorism may be more damaging when done by the many against the few, or by the powerful against the comparatively powerless.