Interpretive Frame
This article is offered as an interpretive lens rather than a definitive account. It does not seek to catalog every instance of privilege or oppression, nor to rank forms of suffering or moral responsibility. Instead, it invites readers to attend to a recurring relational pattern—one that emerges across history, institutions, and everyday life—through which recognition and belonging are negotiated, defended, and at times withheld.
The analysis that follows is grounded in a social constructionist orientation. Power, identity, dignity, and belonging are treated not as fixed attributes or inherent properties, but as outcomes of ongoing relational processes. Recognition is understood as something enacted between people and groups, sustained through shared meanings, narratives, and moral orders. As such, the focus of this article is not on identifying “good” or “bad” actors, but on examining how well-intended struggles for recognition can become entangled in the very hierarchies they seek to disrupt.
Readers may encounter moments of discomfort in this analysis. That discomfort is not incidental. It reflects the tension between lived experience and cultural interpretation—between the desire for justice and the inherited narratives through which justice is often pursued. Throughout the article, I resist framing the reproduction of hierarchy as a matter of personal hypocrisy or moral failure. Instead, I approach it as a systemic and communicative phenomenon, one that operates even in the absence of conscious intent.
The Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) cycle provides the primary analytic frame. It is used here not as a prescriptive model, but as a way of tracing how experience becomes meaning, and how meaning becomes action. The Coordinated Management of Meaning further situates these processes within shared moral orders that shape what feels legitimate, deserved, or natural in a given context.
Finally, this article should be read in conversation with my broader work on emergence and dignity. Its purpose is not to close the conversation, but to open a reflective space—one in which recognition is approached not as a destination, but as an ongoing ethical practice. The question that animates what follows is not simply who has been recognized, but how recognition is practiced once it is achieved, and what kinds of futures those practices make possible.
Recognition, Belonging, and a Persistent Paradox
In the social history of the United States, power and privilege have never been evenly distributed. From the nineteenth century forward—and continuing well into the present—White, straight, Protestant men have occupied the most structurally advantaged position, with other groups experiencing varying degrees of marginalization depending on race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and their intersections. These hierarchies have shaped not only access to material resources, but also who is recognized as a legitimate member of society—whose voices matter, whose experiences count, and whose presence is taken for granted.
Over time, many historically marginalized groups have organized, resisted, and achieved greater levels of recognition and belonging. These gains matter. They represent real shifts in social meaning and institutional access. Yet alongside these advances, a quieter and more troubling pattern persists: recognition, once achieved, does not automatically widen belonging. Instead, it is often converted into a new basis for exclusion.
This paradox—recognition becoming a mechanism of boundary defense rather than solidarity—forms the central concern of this article. Rather than treating it as a moral contradiction or individual failure, I approach it as a relational and systemic phenomenon, sustained through shared meaning-making practices that shape how experience is interpreted and acted upon.
The EIR Cycle and the Reproduction of Hierarchy
To understand why recognition so often reproduces hierarchy, I draw on my Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) cycle. The EIR cycle begins with lived experience, but it emphasizes that experience alone does not determine outcomes. Experiences are interpreted through available cultural narratives and relational frameworks, and those interpretations give rise to patterned responses that shape future social realities.
When applied to struggles for recognition, the EIR cycle reveals a crucial dynamic: advancement within a hierarchy is often interpreted through the very narratives that produced marginalization in the first place.
Experiences of exclusion generate a longing for dignity and belonging. Yet dominant cultural narratives—particularly in stratified societies—frame recognition as scarce, conditional, and earned through differentiation. Advancement is interpreted as proof of merit rather than as evidence of collective possibility. The resulting responses often involve distancing, status defense, and boundary policing.
Through repetition, these responses stabilize new hierarchies. What began as resistance to exclusion becomes participation in its reproduction.
This cycle does not require ill intent. It requires only that meaning-making remain unexamined.
Language and Symbolic Boundary-Making
The reproduction of hierarchy becomes most visible in language. Words such as wannabe, nouveau riche, social climber, sellout, or not really one of us do not merely describe social distinctions; they produce and enforce them. Language functions as a symbolic technology for regulating belonging.
Within the EIR cycle, language operates primarily at the level of interpretation, shaping how advancement is understood and justified. These terms perform relational work: they distance speakers from their own histories of exclusion, normalize hierarchy by reframing it as taste or authenticity, and obscure power by presenting judgment as neutral discernment.
Importantly, such language is rarely idiosyncratic. It emerges within coordinated systems of meaning. Groups come to share stories about who belongs properly, what counts as legitimate identity, and which forms of advancement are suspect. Over time, these stories harden into moral orders that make exclusion feel reasonable rather than violent.
This is how recognition becomes weaponized—not through overt domination, but through everyday meaning-making that renders exclusion ordinary.
Historical and Contemporary Patterns of the Cycle
Seen historically, this cycle repeats across movements for recognition.
Feminist gains expanded recognition for women while simultaneously reproducing exclusions along lines of race, class, sexuality, and respectability. Racial progress opened institutional doors while generating new internal boundaries around speech, comportment, and legitimacy. Class mobility offered escape from material precarity while encouraging narratives that framed success as evidence that the system itself was just.
At smaller scales, the same logic appears in schools, professions, and organizations. Hierarchies train individuals in the grammar of domination long before they encounter it in broader social life. Advancement brings relief—but also scripts for how belonging is to be defended.
Across contexts, the pattern remains consistent: recognition achieved without transformed meaning-making stabilizes hierarchy rather than dismantling it.
Coordinating Meaning and Moral Order
What binds these examples together is not shared identity, but shared coordination. Through the lens of the Coordinated Management of Meaning, cycles of privilege and oppression persist because groups co-construct moral orders that define legitimacy, worth, and belonging.
Within these moral orders, recognition is positional rather than relational. Belonging becomes something to be protected. Exclusion is reframed as discernment. Dignity is no longer something co-created, but something granted conditionally.
The EIR cycle and CMM together reveal that oppression is not sustained solely by structures or attitudes, but by the stories people live within—stories that coordinate responses to experience in ways that feel coherent, justified, and even ethical.
Interrupting the Cycle: Reflexive Recognition and Relational Ethics
If recognition can reproduce hierarchy, the task is not to abandon recognition but to practice it differently.
Interrupting the cycle requires reflexive recognition—recognition that remains aware of its own power to exclude. Reflexive recognition resists treating belonging as an achievement and instead frames it as a relational responsibility.
Within the EIR cycle, interruption occurs at each point:
- Experiences of advancement are held alongside memories of exclusion, not as identity claims but as ethical grounding.
- Interpretations resist narratives of scarcity and merit that naturalize hierarchy.
- Responses extend recognition outward rather than defending it inward.
Relational ethics shifts the guiding question from Who deserves belonging? to What does dignity require in this relationship, now?
Such practices do not eliminate hierarchy overnight. They loosen its grip on meaning.
Emergence, Dignity, and the Practice of Becoming
At its deepest level, the cycle traced in this article reflects a failure of emergence. Recognition is treated as arrival rather than as invitation. Identity hardens. Becoming stops.
In my broader work on emergence, I argue that identity is not something we possess but something we continually enact in relationship. Dignity is not inherent in abstraction nor guaranteed by status; it emerges through recognition that affirms persons as legitimate participants in shared meaning-making.
When recognition is converted into gatekeeping, dignity is withdrawn not only from others but from the relational field itself. Emergence requires a different orientation—one that resists closure, embraces unfinishedness, and treats recognition as an ongoing ethical practice rather than a reward for compliance.
A society committed to emergence must keep belonging porous and dignity relational. Recognition, practiced reflexively, becomes not the end of struggle but the beginning of responsibility.
Author’s Note
This article is part of my larger body of work exploring emergence, dignity, and relational becoming across social, psychological, and cultural contexts. Rather than offering a citation-dense theoretical synthesis, this piece is intentionally conceptual and integrative. It names a recurring pattern I have observed across research, teaching, and lived experience—one that cuts across domains of race, gender, class, and institutional life.
Future work will extend this analysis through direct engagement with recognition theory, critical social theory, phenomenology, and communication theory. Here, my aim is to clarify the pattern itself and to situate it within a broader framework that understands identity as emergent, dignity as relational, and ethics as lived practice rather than inherited rule.
How to cite this article
Green, R. K. (2025). Recognition, boundary-making, and the cycle of privilege. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/recognition-boundary-making-and-the-cycle-of-privilege/
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