When Analysis Becomes Accusation: The Limits of Constructivism
A Short Reflection
It's been over a decade since I wrote my bachelor's thesis on age assessments of unaccompanied minors. But the friction from that experience remains - how my postcolonial analysis inevitably led to the conclusion that all caseworkers were reproducing racist structures. Something that never quite aligned with the reality I encountered.
The thesis examined how age is constructed differently across various contexts and cultures. For many unaccompanied minors from collectivist societies, exact age is less significant - you remain a child until you've undergone certain rituals or assumed certain responsibilities. But in our Western system - the Machine - your 18th birthday is a sharp boundary that determines your rights and society's obligations toward you.
Here arose a fundamental tension between Human and Machine. The caseworkers (the humans) tried to navigate between the young people's narratives and the system's demand for exact birth dates. The Machine - our formalized laws - requires precision where human reality is fluid.
Over the years, I've reflected on this tension. Certainly, our system is built on certain cultural assumptions that can disadvantage others. But labeling all caseworkers as racists missed the point. They were working within a Machine created through democratic processes, where society had defined who has the right to what.
A society is by definition for its inhabitants - that's the very foundation of the social contract. Our laws and systems draw boundaries between us and them, between citizens with full rights and others. This isn't evil but a fundamental organizing principle, even if we might want to develop it in a more inclusive direction.
The lesson became to separate analytical levels:
The individual level where caseworkers do their best within given frameworks
The group level where professional cultures shape practice
The societal level where the Machine defines boundaries and categories
When analysis becomes total accusation, we lose the ability to see how Human and Machine interact. The caseworkers weren't racists - they were humans trying to do right within a system that sometimes clashes with other ways of understanding the world.
Ultimately, it's about acknowledging that our formalized systems always carry cultural assumptions, without therefore dismissing everyone who works within them. It's in the tension between Human and Machine that real change can occur - not by rejecting one or the other.
A reflection on when critical analysis meets the system's reality.