A key philosophical/sociological issue that governments must grapple with is the creation, utilization and impact of social kinds.
What is a Social Kind?
A social kind is a group of people that are defined in a way that is socially significant. Social kinds may or may not overlap with objective physical features. Someone is categorized as a ‘dumb blonde,’ for example, based on the objective characteristic of having a certain colour of hair (though kinds based on physical features usually have edge cases, such as someone with dirty blonde hair). Other social kinds do not have objective physical characteristics, such as a ‘nerd’.
To get more into the complexity of social kinds, lets talk about race. ‘Race’ is a complicated kind because the category is ambiguous: what does it mean to be white, black, Asian, indigenous, etcetera? The importance that society places on race extends far beyond the colour of one’s skin. There are patterns in the life experiences of people of different races, at least some of which are imposed by the public’s perceptions of the category itself (e.g., racism). However, ‘race’ is not an important genetic category: variation within populations is significantly greater than variation between populations.
This means:
Someone’s ‘race’ is a not very useful for predicting their genotype. [1]
If there are behavioral patterns within a ‘race’, they are likely better attributed to cultural and environmental differences.
Race is a useful metaphor for thinking of other social kinds: though social kinds are based on salient features (e.g., Trekkie, teen moms, middle class, liberal, librarian, and so on), groups are defined from the outside as well as from the inside.
Government and Social Kinds
Social kinds play a hugely significant role in government. Democratic governments have, very broadly speaking, three primary functions:
First, they mediate the relationships between citizens through laws and enforcement.
Second, they deliver centralized planning, allowing for public infrastructure and services to be provided more efficiently (e.g., building roads, maintaining an army, etc.).
Third, they redistribute wealth between different social kinds.
Social kinds are hugely important in all three of these areas. Let us begin with wealth distribution. All wealth redistribution is done based on social kinds. Social assistance, food-stamps, inheritance tax, after-school programs. All of these entail judgements about who deserves more money and who should have less.
Wealth redistribution overlaps significantly with centralized planning. Public infrastructure projects usually benefit some groups more than others. Roads, for example, are much more useful to someone who owns a car. Where a new school or prison is built is a matter of social significance.
Law making and law enforcement is often less explicit regarding social kinds. Many laws are intended to apply to all citizens equally. Others, however, do explicitly pertain to social kinds. Hate crime legislation seeks to protect certain vulnerable classes of people. Many countries have legislation that governs the regulation of specific professions, such as healthcare professionals. Laws also tend to impact certain groups in society more than others: a law prohibiting sleeping in public spaces will have a much greater impact on the homeless than the housed.
The Creation and Manipulation of Social Kinds
Society inevitably creates and maintains a plethora of social kinds. Government policy is primarily created within the context of already established kinds. For example, certain groups are considered in greater need of social assistance than others, such as the poor, elderly, or disadvantaged minority groups.
Through their policies, however, governments can also create, change, or reinforce social kinds.
Example 1: After World War II the US government actively propagated a narrative of Asians as a model minority. This was done to make America appear less racist on the global stage during the cold war. [2]
Example 2: For many years in Canada members of the Métis nation, or people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, did not have their rights as indigenous people enshrined in the Canadian constitution. [3]
Example 3: The ‘Welfare Queen’ was a characterization of poor recipients of public benefits, particularly black inner-city mothers, leveraged by Reagan and the GOP since the mid-sixties. [4]
Public policy and political rhetoric can both reinforce the existence of social kinds and shape their collective experience. The idea that Asian people are distinctly intelligent, for example, has also impacted how Asian people collectively view themselves.
Implications for Policy
For policy makers, social kinds are an important dimension of policy creation.
First, it is important that policy makers attend to how social kinds shape their own biases. For example, certain groups are considered more worthy of support than others, and these assumptions should not go uninterrogated. Seniors are recipients of significantly more social spending than children and youth, with a 2014 Maclean’s article finding that those over 65 receive almost four times the amount of financial support that those under 45 receive. [5] Young men are often viewed as the perpetrators of violent crimes and homicide, but they are also the primary victims. [6]
Second, policy makers should pay attention to how their policies may create, reinforce, or change social kinds. Hate crime legislation in the UK is a good example. There are currently five categories of protected characteristics in the UK: race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and transgender identity. A ‘hate aggravated crime’ receives a harsher penalty than the same act if it is deemed not a hate crime. This creates a number of interesting issues. How does additional protection for some groups in society change how those perceive themselves and are perceived by others? What are the implications of the creation of the category ‘hate perpetrator’? One interesting feature of UK hate crime legislation is that not all groups receive equal protection (e.g., a racially aggravated crime is punished more harshly than a disability aggravated crime), what are the implications of that? What about how hate crime legislation simplifies prejudice narratives down to ‘one victim, one perpetrator’, with the ‘cause’ of the crime being found in the victim? [7]
Conclusion
It is important to think about the role government plays in the creation and manipulation of social kinds. Policy can significantly impact how people think about themselves and how they relate to each other, and this should be taken into consideration when creating policy.
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