Creating social roles for the marginalized builds self-esteem and dignity

Evidence

Another approach is to foster the development of social roles and opportunities for people who would otherwise be marginalized or ostracized. Consider the case of nineteen-year-old Kendall Bailey, a cognitively challenged autistic American with cerebral palsy. Kendall had not fared well in conventional schools or organized sports. But life got a lot better for Kendall when he started swimming. He practiced breaststroking—hard—and after he started winning Paralympic-sanctioned races, his self-esteem skyrocketed. Eventually he became one of the fastest disabled breaststrokers in the world. Kendall swam in Beijing in the September 2008 Olympics for disabled athletes. The Paralympics give Kendall and thousands of others with physical disabilities opportunities to garner a sense of self-esteem previously unavailable to prior generations of disabled individuals. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 272

Categorization

• SHARE: Kendall Bailey is a concrete demonstration of how institutionally created roles rescue otherwise-ostracized individuals - worth sharing with anyone working in disability advocacy or sports.
• SEED: Contrast institutionally-created roles (Paralympics) with the earlier social capital research on how structures both enable and constrain self-worth.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self”