Identity: a Layered Journey
A detail from Charles Alston's 1949 Untitled (Seven Figures) Work. Photo: Vallarino Fine Arts
About the Module
This learning tool breaks down complex topics about identity into accessible, ready-to-use sections. Each begins with a short introduction that poses key questions, followed by a curated set of videos, readings and podcasts to get you started, then ending on a brief conclusion to move you on to the next section. The sections are layered: you move from foundational concepts to deeper dilemmas, with each building on the last.
But you don’t need to follow the sequence. Each section also stands on its own: you can jump in wherever your interest takes you, skip around, or head straight to the searchable catalogue to explore more. The goal is to offer flexible entry points into complex ideas, and to equip you with tools to explore them on your own terms.
The section on identity is organized as follows:
- Start Here – What’s at stake in how we think about identity?
- Crafted or Discovered– Is identity innate or made?
- Power – Who constructs identity, and to what end?
- Reclaiming Identity – Can identity be repurposed or reclaimed?
- Beyond Identity? – Are there limits to what identity can explain?
Please note that these resources do not represent the views of our office, but are educational tools to provoke and stimulate further thought and reflection on these topics. For questions related to the catalogue or modules, contact educationoutreach@uwaterloo.ca
Explore Sections Below
Start Here - Introducing Identity
Identity is often treated as something personal: a matter of how we see ourselves or express who we are. But identity has never just been personal. It’s shaped by larger systems: by how societies classify people, distribute power, and decide who counts. Categories like race, gender, class, and citizenship haven’t just been used to describe people; they’ve been used to control them, assigning value, access, and belonging in unequal ways.
At the same time, identity isn’t just forced onto people; it’s also fought over, reclaimed, and reshaped. People push back, take pride in what was once used to shame them, and build communities around shared experience. But even reclaimed identities are still tied to the structures that created them. They don’t fully escape their origins.
What follows isn’t a comprehensive theory of identity. It’s a starting point — a way into the tensions that surface again and again in politics, culture, and everyday life. These dilemmas have no neat resolutions and pretending they do only flatten the complexity of real people's experiences. The goal here isn’t to settle the complexity, but to build our competence to recognize it, grapple with it, and talk about identity with more nuance and care. This learning tool is therefore meant to be the start of a journey, rather than an end.
1. Identity: Made or Discovered?
We often treat identity as either something we’re born with or something we invent, as if it must be fixed and biological or fluid and chosen. But that binary is too simple. Most identity categories, such as race, gender, or nationality, are neither natural facts nor purely personal decisions. They are constructed through laws, institutions, cultural norms, and repeated practices over time. Still, these categories feel real, sometimes painfully so, and people live through them as if they were obvious or self-evident.
But what makes an identity “real”? If someone claimed you belonged to a group you didn’t identify with, how would you disprove them? Would you point to language, ancestry, or skin tone? And what if each of those answers only led to more questions? If it’s language, does fluency prove authenticity? If it’s ancestry, how far back do you go and who decides where the line should be drawn? If it’s skin tone, whose perception counts? The deeper you go, the more unstable the answers become. Identity can feel deeply rooted, yet difficult to define.
The following three videos and readings--on gender, race, and ability--are not meant to be exhaustive. They do not suggest that these are the only or most important areas where identity is constructed. Instead, they offer accessible starting points for thinking about how identity categories are formed, taken for granted, and challenged. Each piece questions the assumption that categories like “gender,” “race,” or “ability” are fixed.
This first session is designed to unsettle those assumptions. The goal is to create space for asking where identity categories come from, how they take hold, and why they feel so real. You don’t need to follow the materials in a specific order. Feel free to move between readings, videos, and themes. This is not a single path, but an invitation to explore identity through multiple angles and entry points.
What makes something what it is and who gets to decide? That’s the question Abigail Thorn explores in this 12-minute video, using gender as a case study. She starts with a familiar puzzle: when we call something a chair, a car, or a woman, what are we really pointing to? Physical traits, how it’s used, how others respond, or something deeper? Many say gender is a “social construct,” but Thorn unpacks what that means in clear, everyday terms. Through examples and thought experiments, she shows that our focus on identities like gender makes them seem like a fact of nature, when in reality it is a shared agreement shaped by repetition, recognition, and power. That doesn’t make them meaningless, it means they’re made, and making has consequences. So if gender isn’t rooted in some immutable idea of nature, what is it rooted in, and what happens when people don't agree?
What if race isn’t fixed, but something made and remade over time? This short 3-minute video from Vox uses the shifting definitions of Whiteness and Blackness to challenge the idea that race is biological or innate. Drawing on the work of Nell Irvin Painter, it shows how racial categories have always been shaped by political needs: who counted as White or Black changed depending on who needed to be excluded, controlled, or brought in. Race, it argues, is not a natural fact, it’s a tool used to organize power. But if race is constructed, then how is it being constructed now, by whom, and with what consequences? And are we, through our everyday behaviour, helping to construct it too?
What really disables someone: their body, or the barriers built around them? This short 1-minute video introduces the social model of disability, which invites us to rethink whether disability is a personal trait or something shaped by how society is organized. Rather than asking how people might adapt to their environments, the video asks us to consider: what kind of environments are being created and for whom? We all move through, think, and sense the world in different ways, but only some of those differences come to be treated as obstacles. It draws attention not just to the labels we use, but to the systems, structures, and designs that turn difference into difficulty. If disability is the product of environmental design, then who is making those designs and what priorities are guiding them?
Judith Lorber, Night to His Day: the Social Construction of Gender (1994)
Sociologist Judith Lorber argues that gender isn’t something we are, but something we do, repeatedly, through social norms, roles, and expectations that make it feel natural. What we call “masculine” or “feminine” is less about biology than about power and performance. If gender is constructed who decides the norms?
Learn more about “Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender”, or search our catalogue for more resources on gender.
Dorothy Roberts, Not So Black and White (2022)
Legal scholar and bioethicist Dorothy Roberts argues that race is not a biological fact but a political invention: first imposed through law and violence, and now sustained by science, media, and corporate interests. Summarizing her book Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011), Roberts shows how modern institutions continue to repackage race as if it were genetic, while ignoring the material realities of racism. If race was created to justify inequality, what does it mean when science keeps trying to prove it’s real?
Learn more about Roberts’ work, or search our catalogue for more resources on race.
Susan Wendell - The Rejected Body (1996)
Philosopher Susan Wendell argues that disability is not simply a medical condition but a product of how societies are built and organized. Inaccessible environments, rigid expectations, and narrow definitions of productivity often create or worsen the experience of disability. If bodies vary widely, why do our systems assume everyone should function the same way?
Learn more about “The Social Construction of Disability”, or search our catalogue for more resources on disability.
Conclusion
The idea that identity is socially constructed has been explored across many fields using a range of approaches. Scholars have shown how categories like mental illness, citizenship, sexuality, kinship, class, childhood, and adolescence often feel natural or self-evident, yet are shaped by social, political, and historical forces. These categories have long, contested histories that reveal how they are created, reinforced, and sometimes resisted. Explore these and other categories in greater depth, from a range of perspectives and authors, in our catalogue.
Up Next...
So far, we’ve focused on how identity categories are made. But we haven’t looked much into why these categories were constructed in the first place, who had the power to define them, and what purposes they were meant to serve. This brings us to the politics of identity: forces that were always present in this section's materials but remained in the background. In the next section, we bring those forces into sharper focus. Read on to “Identity: Shaped by Whom?” to continue.
2. Identity: Shaped by Whom?
Once we see identity as constructed, we have to ask: constructed by whom? And to what end? All identity categories, whether racial, indigenous, gendered, religious, or national, are shaped within systems of power. Communities and cultures are not outside those systems, they are part of how power is organized, reproduced, and sometimes resisted. Identity is never just a neutral description; it carries the imprint of the historical and social forces that made it necessary. Labels like “Black,” “Immigrant,” “Man,” or “Minor” didn’t simply describe people, they helped determine who deserved land, legal protection, mobility, or personhood. Even seemingly neutral or bureaucratic terms (like “non-status,” “at-risk,” or “visible minority”) function to encode difference and justify unequal treatment. Identities shape what people are allowed to have, how they’re seen, and what rules apply to them, often before they’ve had any say in the matter.
Why did colonialists invent an idea of race, and how did it take hold? Danielle Bainbridge explores this in a 12-minute episode of PBS Origin of Everything on how race was constructed in the United States. She shows how colonial elites codified racial hierarchy in law, defining African descent as permanent servitude and privileging people who counted as "white" to divide the poor and suppress rebellion. Pseudoscience later gave these hierarchies the appearance of natural law. Bainbridge argues that race was deliberately constructed (and continues to be remade) by those in power to serve shifting political and economic goals. So who defines race today, how is that definition maintained, and to what end?
In this 10-minute video on gender stratification by Crash Course, they argue how the ways we expect men and women to behave can create divisions that feel natural but produce real inequality. These divisions can show up in pay gaps, barriers to advancement, unpaid work at home, and the lack of women in leadership and politics. The video also argues that certain ideas of masculinity and femininity keep these patterns going in schools, workplaces, and even courts, to the benefit of some groups over others. So what gender distinctions operate today, what are they used to justify, and who benefits?
Why do we think of nations as timeless communities when they’re really modern inventions? That’s the question Johnny Harris explores in this 26-minute video on how humans invented nationalism. Focusing on France as a case study, he draws on Benedict Anderson’s famous idea of imagined communities to show how nations emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, not from ancient bonds but from deliberate efforts to create a shared national story. Public education standardized language, newspapers created a shared mythology, flags gave people common symbols to rally around, while taxation tied people’s fates to the state, masking deep divisions and convincing millions they belonged to a unified nation. So who has the authority to define what a nation is today, how is that authority exercised, and to what purpose?
Barbara & Karen Fields, Racecraft (2012)
Historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields argue that race is not a natural fact but an ideological product of racism, invented to justify exploitation and exclusion. In Racecraft, they show how Americans used “race” to explain historical and ongoing inequalities, treating injustices as if they reflected innate biological differences rather than deliberate discrimination. They call this reversal “racecraft,” likening it to a cultural sleight of hand: habits of thought, language, and perception that make racism invisible by framing race as the cause rather than the result of unequal treatment. They trace racecraft through everyday practices and causal assumptions that sustain racial hierarchy by keeping the focus on race instead of racism.
Learn more about Barbara and Karen Fields’ work here, or search our catalogue for more resources on race and power.
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women (1997)
Sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues that British colonial rule imposed a rigid gender binary on Yorùbá society, which had previously organized roles and status by seniority, lineage, and community rather than biological sex. British administrators redefined Yorùbá society through laws and records that fixed people into categories of “men” and “women,” concentrating property rights and inheritance in male hands through patrilineal succession. These redefinitions served concrete colonial objectives by creating clear, enforceable hierarchies of ownership and authority that enabled land seizure, taxation, and tighter administrative control.
Learn more about Oyěwùmí work here, or search our catalogue for more resources on gender divisions and power relationships.
Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (2012)
Political theorist and historian Mahmood Mamdani argues that European colonial powers invented rigid “native” identities to divide colonized populations and entrench domination. In much of Africa, where ethnic and political affiliations were fluid, colonial administrators fixed people into “tribes” like Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda or Baganda and non-Baganda in Uganda, using censuses, land laws, and legal categories to formalize hierarchy and exclusion. These identities enabled settlers, as a ruling minority, to claim political and economic supremacy and to extract resources from a fragmented, divided population. Long after colonial rule ended, these imposed categories continued to fuel inequality and conflict. If colonial powers could manufacture and enforce identities to secure their control, can those same logics still shape power today?
Learn more about Native as a Political Identity here, or search our catalogue for more resources on identity and colonialism.
Conclusion
Identities come from power, not nature. Throughout history, those in power have crafted markers of difference — gender, race, class, and others — to justify unequal access to resources, authority, and freedom. Over time, their origins are hidden, and these categories are passed off as eternal truths about “biology,” “human nature,” or “evolution.” But identities are not fixed. They shift, disappear, and reappear in new forms, constantly adjusted to serve the needs of those who benefit from them. Once we see this, we can start asking sharper questions: who is deploying these identities, to what end — and how can they be disrupted, challenged, and seized to redefine on our own terms?
Explore the history and power dynamics of these and other categories in greater depth, from a range of perspectives and authors, in our catalogue.
Up Next...
So far, we’ve explored how identity categories are shaped by those in power to justify inequality and maintain control. But that’s not the whole story. People don’t just accept the identities imposed on them — they also contest, resist, and sometimes reclaim them on their own terms. This brings us to the struggles over identity, the ways communities have turned imposed labels into sources of pride, solidarity, and resistance. In the next section, we bring those struggles into focus. Read on to “Identity: Claimed and Contested” to continue.
3. Identity: Claimed & Contested
Over time, many of the categories once used to mark people for exclusion have been reclaimed. Terms like queer, black, crip, or fat, once deployed to shame, regulate, or marginalize, have been redefined as sources of pride, solidarity, and political clarity. The Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, for example, reframed Blackness not as a deficit but as something beautiful, powerful, and worth celebrating. More recently, terms like mad or neurodivergent have been reclaimed to challenge psychiatric authority and affirm difference.
Reclaiming identity offers affirmation and a sense of belonging. It is also a form of resistance, a way to transform stigma into strength and to take back language on one’s own terms. Yet reclaiming identity is not always easy. It often requires an ongoing struggle to have that self-definition seen, heard, and respected, and it can mean working within categories shaped by histories we did not choose. Read, listen, and watch more below to learn about some these struggles, their victories, and achievements.
Why does belonging so often demand that we become someone else? That’s the question at the heart of this CBC short film, which reflects on how a daughter learns to see her father’s work as a janitor, his language, even his name as something she must shed to succeed. Without pride in who she is, she comes to believe she doesn’t measure up, and that the only way forward is to leave her heritage behind. Years later, she understands what that shame cost her. The film asks us to consider how the pressures of assimilation shape who children become, how easily self‑worth is eroded when working‑class labour and our ethnicity is stigmatized, and how those quiet humiliations keep people in line: discouraging ambition, while leaving power to those already deemed worthy. It leaves us asking: how can we reach a world that can treat difference as ordinary rather than a flaw, and where every kind of work carries dignity?
What do you find when you strip away the marks of colonialism and listen for what was always yours? That’s the question at the heart of this PBS Origins video on Négritude, which traces how a group of Black intellectuals in 1930s Paris turned defiance into a movement. In the so-called capital of freedom and civilization, Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Léopold Senghor found their voices in the literary salons of Paulette and Jane Nardal, who created the space for diasporic writers and thinkers to exchange ideas and imagine pride in what colonialism had taught them to despise. Through poetry, surrealism, and African traditions, they spoke back to colonialism in the colonizer’s own language, exposing how its myth of “progress” was built on violence and erasure. Négritude was both a refusal and an affirmation, and it rippled outward, inspiring independence movements, Pan-African solidarity, and a new Black aesthetic. It asks us still: what might grow if we plant what colonialism tried to uproot?
If a rebellion becomes a parade, what does that evolution mean? That’s the question at the heart of this 8-minute PBS Origins video on the history of Pride, hosted by Prof. Danielle Bainbridge. It traces how early respectability-driven pickets like Philadelphia’s 1965 “Annual Reminder” gave way to the defiant Stonewall rebellion of 1969 and then to the first Liberation March in 1970, organized by activists like Brenda Howard. What emerges is a portrait of visibility and affirmation as resistance, a way to say “I can exist” in a world that can refuse to acknowledge that possibility. The video closes by noting how Pride’s growth has raised questions about whether visibility as a radical act has been lost, as corporate sponsorship and uneven inclusion complicate what kind of visibility Pride offers today. At the same time, it points to how Pride has sparked new forms of activism and belonging, from trans and drag organizing to UK Black Pride to events held defiantly in countries that try to ban them, reminding us that its legacy is still being written.
Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Let me Speak! (1977)
What happens when a community refuses to stay silent about its own erasure? That’s at the heart of Let Me Speak!, the powerful testimony of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a Bolivian miner’s wife who found her voice in union organizing and the Housewives’ Committees. She saw how the system taught her people to see themselves as nothing more than invisible labor, not citizens, not women, not humans worthy of dignity. But through hunger strikes, solidarity networks, and public storytelling, she and other women affirmed a different kind of identity in the struggle, not pride in poverty or the hollow victory of climbing above others, but the possibility of a future beyond rich and poor, exploiter and exploited, where no one has to live unseen.
Learn more about Let Me Speak! here, or search our catalogue for more resources.
bell hooks, "Loving Blackness as Political Resistance" (1992)
Writer, critic, and professor bell hooks argues in her essay “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance”, from Black Looks: Race and Representation, that racial superiority in America requires Black people to see themselves as unworthy of love. She examines how racism teaches Black people to see themselves as ugly and unworthy, reinforced by media and cultural narratives that equate "lighter" skin with beauty and value. She argues that choosing to love Blackness, in oneself and others, is a deliberate act of political resistance that disrupts internalized racism and challenges the desire to escape Black identity through assimilation. This work is difficult and incomplete, she acknowledges, but insists that loving Blackness remains essential for healing and collective liberation.
Learn more about Black Looks: Race and Representation here, or search our catalogue for more resources.
Eli Clare, Exile and Pride (1999)
Writer and activist Eli Clare reflects on how slurs like “freak,” “cripple,” and “queer” were used against him to shame his body and desires, marking him as unnatural and broken to justify exclusion and control. In Exile and Pride, he describes how reclaiming these words became a way to transform shame into anger, strength, and joy, a fundamental act of resistance against internalized oppression. He writes that calling himself “queer” and “crip” does not erase the harm those words have done but undercuts their power to wound by naming himself on his own terms. This act forces others to confront the fragility of able-bodiedness, which he calls a temporary state of being enabled, and exposes the violence hidden in assumptions of normalcy. Reclaiming these words does not make them safe or easy but replaces silence and self-hatred with dignity, solidarity, and defiance.
Learn more about Exile and Pride here, or search our catalogue for more resources.
Conclusion
Reclaiming identity is never simple or uncontested. It repairs harm, builds solidarity, brings forth contested views and affirms that there is something worth defending and fighting for, even as it provokes resistance from those who want to keep things as they are. But that struggle is the point. It brings into view the people, norms, and institutions committed to preserving these unspoken definitions that keep us down and unseen divisions that stop us from changing things. Once the battle lines are visible, we can ask the next question: what exactly are these institutions protecting, and how do the systems they are part of actually work? Only then can we be sure we are taking up the right struggle, one that confronts the structures that produce our oppression and exploitation, not just the individuals who enforce them and are constantly turned over.
Up Next...
As struggles for recognition, representation and reduced disparities have become mainstream, questions remain. Does being seen by those in power bring real autonomy, or just reshuffle who belongs while systems stay intact? Are we fighting for better treatment and representation in prisons, more equitable leadership, and better supports for low wage work or are we trying to create a world where prisons, obedience, and poverty are no longer necessary? Will repair and self-affirmation disrupt exploitation, or do those dynamics endure regardless of our self-perception or how others perceive us? In the next section, we will start to explore these questions and more. Read on to Identity: The Need for More to continue.
4. Identity: The Need for More
Introduction
Being seen—by institutions, policies, or public culture—often feels like a political win: to be named and included after long histories of exclusion. It can validate identity, affirm dignity, and offer visibility that once felt impossible. But what comes after being seen? Does being acknowledged necessarily change the social conditions that made visibility necessary in the first place?
When a workplace updates its forms to include more gender options, when a corporation celebrates cultural diversity, when a government policy adds new protected categories—what’s actually shifting? Do these gestures change the day-to-day realities that made exclusion a problem? Do they improve access to housing, education, healthcare, or safety? Or are they new labels on an old problem, reshuffling the boundaries of inclusion while leaving the foundations untouched?
Sometimes, being seen can redraw the map without changing the terrain. It tells us who counts, but not who gets what. And even as more identities are acknowledged, they can be measured against a hidden standard shaped by the values and priorities of those who maintain control over what counts: resources. Though we may recognize we’re all different, only some differences are treated as if they need to be explained, justified, or made legible. Maybe the real issue isn’t who gets invited in, but why the house was built that way in the first place.
Letting go of being seen as the end goal doesn’t mean dismissing what it offers. But it does mean asking what lies beyond it.
What would it mean to build a world where access to housing, healthcare, education, and safety is not controlled by those who can decide who is worth recognizing? What if difference didn’t have to be named, explained, or made legible in order to matter? In that world, would people receive what they need to shape their own lives on their own terms—not because they’re different, but simply because they’re here? And shouldn't being here be enough to deserve the dignity of a self-directed life? Or would the same problems persist, but in new and different ways?
The language of liberation can be repurposed to uphold the very systems it claims to oppose. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s critique of elite capture shows how identity politics is often hijacked to exploit others for their benefit. He traces how demands for justice and inclusion, instead of dismantling oppressive systems, can be redirected to benefit a select few: those who already have access, resources, and status. In this way, movements that begin as collective struggles for transformation can be neutralized into symbols, policies, and representation that leave inequality intact. Táíwò asks us to consider what it would mean to reclaim identity not as a matter of inclusion and diversity, but as a basis for solidarity that cannot be so easily captured.
What are we being asked to trade when inclusion becomes a cage rather than liberation? This 9-minute video traces how "Asian" became a symbol of the “model minority.” In the early 20th century, Chinese and Japanese immigrants were vilified as the “yellow peril,” seen as diseased, criminal, and unfit to live alongside Americans. But during the Cold War, the U.S. began welcoming Asian Americans as disciplined, upwardly mobile citizens, a showcase of fairness meant to discredit the civil rights movement and Soviet critiques of racial inequity in America. That inclusion, however, came at a cost: it erased diversity within Asian communities, fractured solidarity with other groups, and imposed impossible standards that turned even “positive” representation into a cage. The video invites us to ask whether inclusion, and something beyond this politics of representation, is necessary.
When inclusion feels like a band-aid on an open wound, what does it really offer? In this short video, Sujatha Gidla, recounts her life as an “untouchable,” marked from birth by caste and bound to labour deemed too filthy for anyone else. Even after immigrating out of India and finding new confidence in work and freedom of expression, she recognizes that the stigma lingers, unhealed. Affirmation and visibility may soothe some of the shame, but they leave the deeper structure of exploitation intact: a structure that assigned her family to menial labour for centuries because someone had to do the work. Her story forces us to ask: if caste is a social order that needs certain people at the bottom to function, what good is even positive representation in the same system that depends on their degradation? Does visibility without dismantling the structure simply make the cage more bearable? And if the roots of inequality are based on an authoritative distribution of labour, how far can identity-based inclusion really go before it preserves the very order it claims to oppose?
Joy James, From Welfare Queens to Black Girl Magic (2022)
Can diversity serve as a buffer for inequity rather than a challenge to it? That’s the question philosopher Joy James takes up in this conversation, tracing a century-long pattern of colonial powers co-opting select members of racialized and gendered minorities to defuse social movements and preserve control. Narratives of “excellence” and visibility, she argues, mask the ongoing dispossession and exploitation of marginalized communities, while those who ascend are constrained, unable to speak for the excluded without risking removal and replacement by someone more compliant. The interview forces us to confront a harder truth: is it progress to gain entry into spaces built on exclusion, or merely a strategy to neutralize resistance to larger problems? And if “excellence” within those spaces is just another name for assimilation and co-optation, what is the alternative, when exclusion often means poverty and dispossession?
Learn more about Joy James’s work here, or search our catalogue for more resources.
Daniel Webb, Inclusion Isn't Enough (2019)
Political scientist Daniel Webb argues in his article, “Inclusion Isn’t Enough”, that the popular ideal of the "open city", where everyone can access and enjoy urban space equally, isn’t what it claims to be. Too often, he notes, planners and developers celebrate accessibility while ignoring the violence that made redevelopment possible in the first place: communities bulldozed, residents displaced, and neighbourhoods erased. Worse, the very financial barriers created by this process---soaring rents, inflated property values---are treated as natural facts, outside the conversation about access. Webb asks: what does it mean to talk about an “open city” while leaving these barriers intact? And what would city design look like if we stopped taking them for granted and treated affordability as the foundation of accessibility?
Learn more about “Inclusion Isn’t Enough” here, or search our catalogue for more resources.
Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (1974)
What happens when policy changes but power doesn’t? That’s the question political scientist Michael Parenti examines in Democracy for the Few. He argues that reforms like civil rights laws, social programs, and workplace protections, while real and hard-won, remain fragile because they leave the underlying distribution of wealth and power untouched. Policy, Parenti argues, is only as durable as the popular pressure sustaining it, and concentrated economic interests are poised to undermine or reverse gains that threaten their margins. Real change, he contends, requires addressing the systemic inequalities embedded in the political and economic hierarchy, not mistaking concessions for transformation.
Learn more about Democracy for the Few here, or search our catalogue for more resources.
Conclusion
Challenging inclusion and reform as ends in themselves is never easy or comfortable. It unsettles what feels like progress, exposes hidden bargains, and asks whose interests our victories really serve (despite our best intentions), all while drawing fire from those invested in keeping the game as it is. But that discomfort is the point. It forces us to see the systems beneath the surface: the ways policies are reversed when power feels threatened, the way inclusion can be used to buffer rather than disrupt, the way visibility and repair can leave the deepest inequalities intact. Once we see the rules for what they are, Parenti argues, we can ask ourselves what it would mean to not just have a place in the system, but to create a world that no longer needs to be managed this way?
Up Next...
Beneath every policy and reform lie the unspoken rules: the quiet interests, assumptions, and systemic pressures that shape not only who benefits and who pays, but also how institutions and their leaders must behave to survive. Even those we think are in charge are often just responding to the logic of the system they serve. Too often, fights for fairness end up polishing those rules instead of breaking them. What happens when we stop asking how to make the system more inclusive and start asking what it exists to protect, and why even its gatekeepers can’t escape its demands? The next section explores how systems work, why so many gains prove fragile, and what it really takes to confront the structure, not just its surface.
Click here to read on to our next module: Systems.