Worldbuilding: Systems...So you want to invent a prejudicial and discriminatory system... or change the ones you know
This section will heavily lean into philosophy and sociology. I have to caveat this part heavily that though I majored in anthropology concentrated in systems, the theoretical framework for how it would work with say a newly minted prejudice isn’t well put together in either anthropology, sociology or philosophy. Rather, I put these things together as a theoretical model based on overlap I’ve seen with my specific intersections. I am also far, far more familiar with getting hated for random things I can’t control than I am for having a privilege. Despite this, I did my best to collate things together to give you things to think about and think through for the thing you want to create.
I have leaned a bit into psychology and social psychology as well. However, I’m not using debunked theories, but I will mark them in case you want to examine them anyway. This probably should go after the whole art-clothing-religion posts, since systems of discrimination often weaponize, burn or otherwise try to degrade on those very visible bases (also food. Food is an easy passport, thus also easier to attack). But I thought I would put the theory out there given the recent hateful rhetoric so people could deconstruct it.
BTW, Hate isn’t fun to read, but I think it makes you appreciate love more. A lot of the activists I’ve read have treaties on hate, but then turn around and talk even more fiercely what it means to love. And I think you’ll understand that.
As I’ve said many times, “Hate is not creative, love is. This is because you must honestly and truly face each person that you choose to love and see them for who they truly are, but hate erases their faces.”
Vocabulary
Attained- You earned it during your lifetime. I know people are going to say that it’s clear cut, but sometimes it isn’t and then it gets tricky.
Ascribed- In sociology this means it was given to you, but you didn’t get to choose it and you didn’t do anything to earn it.
prejudice- “requires having learned a negative stereotype in the form of concepts, beliefs, and emotions“ https://academic.oup.com/book/6982/chapter-abstract/151285773?redirectedFrom=fulltext
This is generally internalized, i.e. for the in-group.
Comes in many forms.
discrimination passive versus active.- Discrimination are actions that lead to hate towards another group.
It is possible to discriminate against a group without having the prejudice to do so due to peer pressure, not wanting to out yourself, or not wanting to face discrimination.
It’s also to be discriminatory by not taking an action to intervene--which makes the whole thing messy.
You can also be actively discriminatory and have prejudicial beliefs.
System- System (for this post) is mostly referring to prejudice and societal rules and expectations towards certain people by class, race, ethnicity, religion, ability, sexuality, sexual orientation, etc.
intersectionalites- This is where more than one identity is within the person. So Queer and PoC. This is not the same thing as the additive model where it asks you to do one at a time. Instead it says in the experiences of the person, these things cannot be separated individually, but must be studied together.
equality
equity
The popular image to distinguish them. (Not my image)
marked v. unmarked.
So something like Woman teacher is marked. Gay football coach is marked. Unmarked would be something like Doctor or lawyer. The problem often is that marginalize groups are marked. And even within marginalized groups, the “majority” group goes unmarked, while the majority group goes marked. It’s one of those things useful for storytelling about prejudice.
So for example, for a while there were aces that said that sex repulsed, no sexual attraction ever were the “default” but the “marked” group was “Gray aces” and “Demi Aces (somehow forgetting all of the other aces, but whatever).
Anyway, this creates a false “default” group, though later on the sexrepulsed aces no sexual attraction ever group relabeled to “Black Stripe Aces” which means both groups are now marked. (Demis are under gray aces as a subset.)
This can also be subtle as well, when groups try to say “I’m more oppressed more than you” though the original person who termed “oppression olympics” solidly argued against it and said that cooperation should be needed.
It’s also worth it to know microaggressions, though the word might have warped meaning since I last used it. It often is paired with implicit belief systems.
BTW, there is hot debate on if after you set up a system if people within the system no matter where they are are automatically complicit in it, which I’ve covered a whole ton. Sometimes it’s really difficult or impossible not to feed or perpetuate a system, even when you’re trying to change it. And it gets trickier with intersectional needs, etc which I already covered.
Why are humans prone to prejudice?
If culture is defined, as we did earlier on an impossible ideal no one can achieve, then prejudice, theoretically makes this ideal amplified, more impossible and worse.
Humans are prone to want meaning and pattern to everything so it can be organized, but the world is chaos. And chaos is hard to accept to our primate ape brains.
Humans want to think they are doing good when they are doing bad.
Not all cultures, but a lot of European cultures think of things in binary. Good vs. Evil. Rather than shades of good an shades of bad, and where are we with that?
Humans don’t think about impact, intention, and have trouble separating it. If the intention is good, then how can the impact be bad? If the intention was bad, but the impact was good, then is the person still evil? Ah, philosophy loves, loves these questions.
Also, most religions point out that empathy takes time, effort, attention which most people don’t want to spend. And by most religions, I am pointing ot Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Mugyo to a degree, Taoism, etc. One of the huge core philosophical problems that religion tries to often tackle is how do you get people to share when they have too much. Thus people are more prone to judging over sharing in an effort to be selfish and say their own desires are greater than anothers to prove they deserve to own things. STUFF, which often gets a specific name in many religions. But maybe this exact struggle that religions keep asking us to not judge others, golden rule, shows an exact human struggle with accepting the other and seeing systems of oppression around you and being willing to take action to stop them.
How to create a Prejudice
- Privileged group suppresses and dominates over something they want.
- Feel guilty about it and then justify it.
Try to retcon it in 2 steps:
- A. Retcon it to the privileged group such that the justifications become “facts”
- B. Retcon it to the suppressed group. In technical speak create internalized prejudice.
Total erasure so it is not taught, thought about or spoken about so the original suppression history is lost to the group because the system was “always this way”, “It’s natural” and “It never changed” so that the people who are being suppressed stay suppressed. Privileged group wins.
It’s important to know that the justification system doesn’t have to ever match the reason initially why those people were oppressed. If it was for money, wealth, power, then the framing system doesn’t have to be about money, wealth or power. It could be, because they look weird, have the wrong _religion, ethnicity, etc_. The justifications the group comes up with is always on differences they perceived about the other group, but usually the reasons why it started aren’t related. They need a mechanism to feel superior.
For example, the framing that poor people are lazy comes from a misreading of the Bible, which was used to justify the workhouses from the regency period to about the mid 20th century. Because the real reason for the disparity wasn’t really about poor people being lazy or that they didn’t work hard enough, but that over time rich people accumulated a large amount of wealth, sometimes with swindling without any checks on their activities. They might have said things like God gave me this wealth and power, and then the connections other people had to them reinforced that over time. But it feels better to say poor people are lazy, rather than to face poor might be working three to four jobs to try to get ahead and may not have access to things like housing, food, medical care, and so on the rich took away from them through generational wealth. It’s much easier to think that you and your own earned it through legitimate means than to think you earned that wealth through say the government giving you handouts and redlining so Blacks were kicked out of their neighborhoods so you could get benefit--we earned this through hard work through getting education, not because we helped to suppress other people. Owning the bad one has done, and ones predecessors has done is hard.
This is why Ben Affleck is known for being liberal, but having issues with confronting his slave owning ancestor. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/25/417455657/after-ben-affleck-scandal-pbs-postpones-finding-your-roots
It’s easier to deal with how one thinks they are good and their own before them were good, and the benefits one has in their current time to be morally correct. It’s much, much harder to acknowledge that one is bad or could be bad.
To make it work:
- you need an impossible ideal for people to achieve and rank people closer to that ideal
- If you recruit more people into thinking that they can be the ideal, the more that the system will codify and be harder to overthrow.
- Fear and loss of control are used as methods to divide and conquer mainly to reinforce the system and force the privileged group to keep to the system.
- Doing a series of divides and conquers every time a civil rights issue comes up, so people fight for your table scraps is the best strategy.
- Make it so people focus on the wrong issue and take umbrage every time the core issue is addressed. For example, Asian rights--that’s OK, though still take exception to that. But whiteness? Oh, you have a fight on your hands, because that’s the power basis. You hate white people now, rather than the basis on which the racism system actually operates.
- If you take away basic resources and rights, like right to food, water, shelter from the less privileged group, this shows the threat of what happens if the privileged group is “with them”.
- Pit different oppressed groups against each other or say one group has more when they do not. There are a lot of examples of this. Gays against Blacks. Blacks against Gays. Asians against Blacks. Blacks against Asians. White Immigrants against PoC immigrants and then use that leverage to get what the privileged group wants and
- Make sure to ignore intersectionality. What do you mean there is a Gay Black Asian and White Immigrant? “One. at. a. time. people.” “Don’t be confusing.” “You must hate yourself.” That sort of rhetoric.
Then you need a justification for why these people can’t achieve that ideal, then put in roadblocks to make sure they can’t possibly achieve that ideal. If you do it over at least two generations, one can say it was natural and supposed to be this way. The more generations without people fighting back or making it impossible for them to fight back, the better because the real history as it gets erased will be forgotten.
Prejudice and the abuse wheel
BTW, if this vaguely looks like the abuse wheel, welp, as I’ve said many times, Hate is not creative. Love is creative.
How does privilege work. Warning PDF: https://socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fact_3-2010-oppression.pdf
- Fragility is created by the rigidity that the system demands by creating an impossible ideal. The more impossible the ideal, the more likely if people are told, they can achieve it too, they can cooperate.
General Characteristics about privilege:
- Privilege allows one to ignore the problem
- One can quit at any time one wants.
- One can choose not to engage
- The benefits are invisible built over generations, not ones own lifetime such that they become ascribed status. However, the person is more likely to focus on their achieved status.
- privilege works so that one doesn’t have to see the wrong.
- privilege is endemic in the system, but talking about the system is not allowed or seen.
- the systems has to lie to both the marginalized and privileged
- justifications
- a scant 100 years is enough to establish a system
- privilege is more likely to love the idea of individualism over collectivism—greater good
- Privilege will label social justice, progress towards equity and awareness as “angry” and label it with “negative” emotions.
- privilege may shift by location
- Privilege will often stick itself into places it doesn’t belong with behavior like ‘splaining, invading minority places, or fail to recognize statistics/real numbers why their feelings comes before fact.
- fragility
- talking violence to real people is less desirable
- controlling media is a huge part of the system.
- Denial of participation
- Minimizing
- Xblind- didn’t happen, can’t see, it but know how I love those people.
- bootstrap argument
• “Stop being so sensitive! I didn’t mean it.” Speaking in a derogatory manner about a person or group of people based on social group memberships can, cumulatively, have a devastating impact (Sue, 2010). Disconnecting our own language or action is another form of resistance because it minimizes the indiscretion and sends the message that anyone who challenges the language or behavior is simply being overly sensitive. https://studylib.net/doc/8345440/oppression-without-bigots---sociologists-for-women-in-soc...
• “I am just one person, I can’t change anything!” Seeing oneself as incapable of creating change is a means of excusing oneself from accepting any responsibility. Individuals often conceive of social inequalities as too large to tackle, and thus rationalize their lack of action.
- privilege separates privileged from the marginalized group such that it becomes harder to communicate.
- Tone policing.
Active Hater:
- Control is the point because change is scary.
- Most of the time the main device is fear mongering about the other.
- It’s explicit, in your face, and might even come down to genocide.
- Often addicted to conflict and pressed into constant anxiety. It’s not healthy.
- Often hate people, but have never worked to understand or met them.
Passive Privileged person
Permanent bystander I don’t hate that group of people, but you know, I don’t want to really interact with them, have them in my house, or really be around them that often because, really, I need something that feels “normal”. I’ll stand up against explicit hate because I’m not a bad person, but you know that needling that person did, was it really prejudice? When that person cut that socially disadvantaged person off at every turn, not sure if it really was privilege. I kinda know it’s wrong, but I’m not going to speak up and speak out. When that person said, “This is America!” and my PoC friend told me that, maybe the person was having a bad day I’ll explain to them, because you know, it’s not good to rock the issues too much.
The “Be nice” person. Be nice in only this situation to the least number of people without thinking about long term consequences of that person’s ignorance. Someone might think it’s funny to call me a “G--k” if the person is a bystander and says to me, be nice to them and don’t challenge them or be angry, who does that help the most in that situation? The unwitting person that doesn’t know it’s a slur and might use it to someone else, me, or only a Bandaid in the situation. Thus niceness doesn’t help end the prejudice. Often this camp of people also say, “Why are you so angry” and ask why it’s justified and ask you to justify it to them or say that words don’t hurt or matter, only actions do, as if words were not actions and words have not gotten civil leaders killed. Master of telling you how to act and feel so they don’t have to be uncomfortable types. But you see, it’s not discriminatory to act this way, they say. Sometimes the kindest thing to do is point out that the word is a slur and take it slowly so the person knows this is true.
Ignorant Ally: Wants to do good, but ignorant on the issues. An ignorant ally, BTW, is very useless. Sometimes ignorant allies can do more to hurt a cause than help it. In this way they still are passive.
Whack-a-mole: Activated, but want to tackle one person at a time, too timid to think about laws, and then finds out there is a deluge coming in their direction. Another mole comes up, but they aren’t moving forward, and don’t want to really spend time on the larger causes. This is more closer to the self-satisfied schadenfreude addict than doing anything effective.
Schadenfreude addict- In it to feel superior to other people, but if you ask them if they are really thinking about changing the cause, and working to listen to people’s concerns, the answer is no. They aren’t whacking moles one by one, but they are looking for a quick fix so it’s about THEM not the cause. When they meet resistance, they lose sight of the goal in front of them. Honestly, these, especially when the person is privileged and don’t belong to the group they are defending are the worst to deal with. Bystanders can be activated. Allies can be educated, Whack-a-mole types can be redirected to larger causes, these types of addicts really don’t care about the cause, the minority group or the people in front of them. They only care about themselves and their next fix. Often these people will hurt your cause rather than help it by doing more damage by thinking they are doing good when they really don’t care beyond feeling morally superior. Because their goal is antagonism, it often alienates people who could have been converted and creates more division than unity.
Active Privileged Positive Person
There are far more activists with better theories than me in this field in variety of places. The anti-woke crowd usually hates them.
I would try for people like Martin Luther King Jr (not the I have a Dream speech, though it’s you’re going to read that, read the ENTIRE thing and reflect on why he didn’t call it the “March on Washington” like a lot of white people these days call it).
I’d also look at bell hooks
Audre Lorde
The Free Breakfast movement (which was Black, Latine, and Asian) It’s partnership and allyship and how much positive it can do over time.
If you want to get into the really confusing gritty stuff they don’t usually show in things like Marvel Comics, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind--gives you a headache swimming through it, but worth looking at. I should note that most actions where one group tries to sell out another group never work out in history and often both groups are set back when they cut out intersectionality and refuse to focus on the main issue. As I said for racism, the focus should be on whiteness. (Which is not the same thing as hating white people.)
As a weird side step, though if you analyze it correctly, you’ll think about it, The Hatfields v. McCoys. I know people won’t think it’s social justice related, but it shows how quickly lies, fear and hate can circulate, so if you analyze the situation and really think on it, you should be able to come up with interesting takes.
I’d also read NK Jemisin, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou on what it was like to break into the writing industry and the activism they did. They often talk about how to write to your own group also what makes an ally an ally.
Allyship is always precarious for the in-group. They have nothing to lose and also nothing to really gain from the insider’s perspective. No matter how many daughters, sons, children, nieces, nephews, spouses, etc that were of that label, it doesn’t mean they will be reliable.
On the flipside, it’s often difficult to be an ally, because you have to learn about positives and negatives of your own history and what people like you did in similar situations. Plus you have to reflect on a lot of shitty things all of the time that are absolutely draining, so quitting looks easier than persisting.
I get that people on the internet think allyship is yelling at people and then trying to win the argument against them, but honestly that doesn’t usually work and I made a treaties about that already. (Philosophy of Social Activism or something like that since I couldn’t find any documents about how hard it actually is to climb through it.)
So for this, I defer to much better writers than I am about what it actually means.
Ways to oppress people:
Nature v. Nurture Argument Wherein you argue it's nurture or nature to make the argument that whatever the person is experiencing/experienced is wrong.
Groups Observed Examples: LGBTQIA community, Adoption community, Mental Health community, Foster care community, body image. (Previously the left handed people of the 1950's and earlier.) Also, some disabilities.
Polarization Wherein the person outside of the experience argues that the group is either all evil or all good. (i.e. hate or philia)
Groups Observed Examples: Fetishizing of women in PoC groups is philia. Noble Savage is a philia. "Blacks are all criminals" is hate.
Sweeping generalizations about the group rather than examining the individuals. All _X_ are X. All groups I know of go through this. They have to fight for the right to individuality and range within their community. Often when doing so, people on the outside argue that they are "impossible" to deal with and that the individualism within the group is proof of the reason they can polarize them. Also assumption that one person's opinion is all of the group's opinion. Also often used as a reason to use a "divide and conquer" approach to civil rights.
Economic interest A lot of prejudice starts with pure economic interest.
Groups Observed Examples: Gay people and lesbian people are told in some states/countries that they can be fired for their sexual orientation and no other reason. PoCs have also suffered greatly due to economic interest (GB is NOT exempt. I have sources for that). Socio-economic classes also fall into this. And so on. Some religious groups as well, such as Jews, recently Muslims, etc.
Invasion of personal boundaries because of X without permission. "Where are you really from?" "What do you have?" "Well are you on welfare?" Or asking personal questions in general to prove a political point, etc. (It's no longer about the person in front of you.)
Groups Observed Examples: People with disabilities, Adoption and Foster Care, PoCs, LGBTQIA (from what I heard)
"Closet" idea. This is where one has to reveal themselves as being part of the minority power group. Sometimes other people "out" you without permission. Groups Observed Examples: LGBTQIA tends to share this across the board. Some Adoption legs also have this feature attached. Mental Health also has this feature. *Some* segments of PoC also have this (i.e. the controversial trying to pass). LGBTQIA tends to go through this issue more. (As a converse, some people think they can "sense" it and just know by looking).
Projection/Transference "You should be grateful."/ "Get over it." Wherein the Majority power group tells the minority power group that whatever they benefitted from them is their problem. OR feel like the position of the minority power group is such that they can project their hate and desires onto them. (For example: "When I touched her butt, she was asking for it wearing that short skirt.")
Groups Observed Examples: All groups I've run into complain about this issue.
Assumption that the only thing they talk about 24-7 is their affiliation with Minority Power group OR only Majority power group. Women talk only about feminism, or only talk about men. LGB talk only about sexual orientation and the heteronormative group, etc.
Groups Observed Examples: All. I have yet to run into a group that hasn't had this problem on television or media.
Infantilization Classic examples are "Women can't rescue themselves." "White people need to rescue the native population from themselves." "Adopted people are forever children." And drawings of actually putting people in baby clothes in order to demean their group. (And if you doubt that happened... uhhh... it really is disturbing). This can simply be done by tone and lecturing someone on what it means to be a part of their group because the dominant group thinks they know better and thus, the lecturing in a slow voice is like schooling a misbehaving child.
Groups Observed Examples: Women, PoCs, Adopted People (though I've heard of Relinquishing parents getting this crap too), People with Disabilities (Physical or mental), LGBTQIA, and senior citizens. (Good to put into media as a way to suppress and demoralize a population.)
Savior Complex/"You should be grateful." The majority group feels obligated to "save" the minority group from mostly themselves, so then the minority group has to be grateful by working harder for the majority group.
Groups Observed Examples: LGBTQIA, Adoption, PoC, Women
Minority power groups are compared to or are "food" *trigger warning* "fruity" for homosexual, particularly gay. (Notice the gender relations overlap) Women, in general being compared to food. "Her skin was like honey." "Her skin was like cream." (Contrast point, men are usually cutlery.) PoCs on food comparisons. N.K. Jemisin pointed this out, but the majority of the skin comparisons for African descent tends to be slave items. "Almond" eyes for Asian. (And really excuse this) *strong trigger warning* (Not way to censor it...: sorry.) coconut, Twinkie, etc for half or passing. Mental Health: "nutty" When did other humans become digestable? There is so much psychology to unpack in this one. (Freud's oral phase, anyone?)
Minority groups compared to animals. I think this one is obvious. This is more likely to come up in writing and not so much in every day life anymore, but it does come up. I'll leave you to think of them on your own.
Groups Observed Examples: biracial... (I've heard one for black and white). From here, you get basic behaviors to ignore there is a problem... but I think we know them all. It's a basic "No See Monkey, No Hear Monkey and I didn't speak it Monkey. It was Monkey's grandfather who gave that privilege. So Monkey doesn't have to do anything to challenge that privilege. Besides Monkey's best friend is X and *they* never told me about the embarrassing prejudice they got even though I never asked more than one person or about their experience, so it doesn't exist." Yes, I know they are really apes...
“They are Invaders”
Basic fear mongering and paranoia.
Groups observed: Gay people. Immigrants/Xenophobia. PoC, trans. LGBTQIA in general. Neurodiversity “I mean there are so many Autistic people right now--they had to be 'created’“ type of lines.
One. At. a. Time.
You are lying. You can’t be this combination.
“What do you mean legal immigrants can be PoC.” *cough* Haitian Immigrants seeking Asylum who are not from mental institutions which were pretty much shut down though not completely during Reagan’s era.
“You can only be biracial PoC and white." Forget Blasian.
“You can’t be Korean and a Jew because adoptees don’t exist and Jews don’t adopt. Only Christians can adopt.” (I’ve gotten this one, despite the head rabbi in NYC of a pop synagogue is Korean Jew)
“You can’t be trans woman and identify as gay.”
“You can’t be nonbinary and label your sexual orientation as ___.”
Pansexual and Bisexual. Do I have to explain it to the point that this group came up with Schrodinger’s cat?
“What do you mean you can have more than one disability and be gay.”
“Stop saying you’re disabled and asexual, that’s harmful to the disability community.”
Groups Observed: All of the ones I can think of. Are there any exceptions?
Policing Language of the Oppressed Group.
“You can’t use CRT and Woke anymore, PoCs, it’s hateful to white people.”
“You can’t use Karen to call out white women, because it’s hateful to all women.”
“Queer was ONLY an oppressive word” and wasn’t used in the 19th century by in-groups of Queer people to label themselves, and later claimed in the 1980′s mostly by PoC activists and advocated for by people like by Audre Lorde.
“Gender critical,” originally was a branch of Critical theory, thus using it to hate on trans is also anti-women, since the people the came up with Gender Critical theory are mostly women, not trans people. BTW, a large chunk of the women I mention in this post also contributed to it. Kimberlé Crenshaw heavily contributed to it (She came up with Intersectional theory, and she’s really good to read to try to navigate Misogynoir on Anita Hill’s case) So as an auxilary, it’s also racist.
Groups observed: ALL of them. You can’t use that word anymore because you are being hateful, so the issue becomes about rhetoric, pedenatic and you never have to discuss the core issue. Racism (a system of hatred based on melanin and physical features which ranked people by the amount of melanin they have as better or worse.) Sexism, etc. This often comes with a huge side of ‘splaining as well.
If the privileged group wins, BTW, then the oppressed group runs out of language to talk about the problems against their group and couple that with massive retcons, and this sets back the group spectacularly in one fell swoop--sometimes you don’t need the other stuff. If you can control on those two fronts alone, you can win in less than a generation. (I know this as an adoptee. It’s really amazing how much adoptees don’t know anything about adoption history and since we didn’t get to fight to shape the language around adoption, the popular rhetoric is fought against us on the street and we have no defenses to fight back because finding the history is pulling teeth ‘cause it’s buried under the other pile of history that’s often purposefully forgotten. Being an adoptee is getting shocks every time you run into another doc that talks about it usually with some other social justice issue.)
Ways power corrupts absolutely
Most of the time, let’s be honest, the majority of hatred directed towards others is about property or just pure and utter disgust at finding something is different. Power only amplifies what is inherently a part of the person.
Why is it so difficult to overturn a started system, but it is faster to set up one?
Setting up division is faster because hate is as stated, much easier to reach for and do than empathy. Quick judgements take no time at all to sit and understand the person across from you. You can be lazy point to a person, and voila. It takes time to codify it, but once it is codified, the lies are circulating and it’s difficult to overturn when you’re denied your own history.
Extended analogy time.
Say a bunch of kids were kidnapped as babies from their neighbor’s house. The neighbor could not get their children back from the kidnappers. The children as then told that those weird people over there want to kill them and they shouldn’t believe them.
There is nothing to contradict that for those children that this isn’t true and in fact if the whole society shouts at them this is very normal, how are they supposed to believe their biological parents that they love them and only want them to be home with them? If you multiply this over time, such that these children have children of their own, they would legitimately believe their kidnappers. and generations after would believe the kidnappers.
Overturning this information would be hard. But say they are also told for various reasons and their children are also that DNA tests will kill them. Or they are denied information about DNA and are told they will be called evil for doing so, overturning that whole belief system without any alternative narrative is difficult. Even if they did the DNA tests, they might have doubts and think they might say... “go to hell” for doing so or DNA tests introduce harmful chemicals, etc. Degrees of the belief would persist because they were robbed of the original story and their history.
Say they were able to finally get the DNA test... well, now they don’t know the original history, because that was their great grandmother’s family and that history is lost. So maybe those cousins in the family would call that branch of the family names once they found out that these descendants had been kidnapped. There is no history to tell them they were great people at all. Maybe their great grandfather was a banker. They can’t find it out—the records are too old, the town willfully helped and burned them, so the stories about their ancestors being say... homeless ruffians that stole things might still plague them. How can they overturn this?
This is why it’s entirely possible to subjugate a population. Humans cling to history, time, movement, but also don’t want to think of themselves as the aggressors.
Did Feminism fail Men?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOhs9jxe4lM
This is probably worth watching to think on if Privilege have negative effects on the privileged group as well. This isn’t to say the privileged group is “more oppressed” than the people they oppress, but to think and examine if the separation created really was helpful to the society and the lack of integration between the groups, or the built up animosity might also create issues people don’t think about. (Fragility, for example is one--not being able or not knowing how to talk to people of that group after the brainwashing job the system did, etc or really being afraid of that group when they could have been sharing a beer with you.).
