Ruby slippers and social construction

Here's Rossman on social constructionism.

Social construction is a really useful concept, but unfortunately, this really important concept has the misfortune of being popular with idiots who don’t really understand it. When this sort of person says “x is socially constructed” the implication is “therefore we can ignore x.” When I lecture on social constructionism I ridicule this sort of thing as “ruby slippers” social constructionism, as if your sociology professor tells you “why Dorothy, you’ve had the power to solve inequality all along, just click your heels three times and say ‘race is a social construct,’ ‘race is a social construct,’ ‘race is a social construct.'” If you really grok social constructionism, the appropriate reaction to somebody invoking the concept in almost any practical context is to shrug and say “your point being?” If you actually read Berger and Luckmann rather than just get the gist of it from some guy with whom you are smoking weed, you’ll see that the key aspects of social constructionism are intersubjectivity and institutions. That is social construction is important because social interaction is premised on shared conventions and becomes deeply codified to the extent that for most purposes it might as well be objective.

All of that makes twitter discussions around social constructionism less constructive than it might be.