Human beings develop beliefs about the world based on their interpretations of observations and experiences, actively preserving, interpreting and producing meaning within their social world. The physical embodiment of cultural capital has become a substantial, if not primary, educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that establish the norms that define our self-understanding, the foundation of social life, and dictate one's position within the world. social order. Repeated exposure to socializing agents within a family normalizes some dynamics and renders others invisible in the process, a cycle of cultural relativism that resonates with older adults who have been taught the same lessons since childhood. Pierre Bourdieu, a French anthropologist and philosopher, pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural capital, symbolic violence, and the concept of habitus, which he defines as: The constitutive structures of a particular type of environment (e.g., the material conditions of existence characteristics of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable and transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of generation and structuring of practices and representations that can be objectively "regulated" and "regular" without be in any way the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to one's ends without presupposing a conscious aiming at the ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to achieve them and, all of this being, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a director. (Bourdeiu 72) Lacking the conscious intention to produce recurring results, habi...... middle of paper ......ng existence by silencing the emotional, psychological, and physical burden with the help of injectable narcotics; some will seek treatment and others will inevitably die. The harsh reality of poverty is the predestined cycle of life and death at the hands of poverty, a fate that seems almost inevitable. They are blind to the structural and ideological forces surrounding racism as in everyday interactions individuals – and major categories of individuals defined by skin color – confirm to themselves and others that they deserve their fate. Understanding the ethnic components of habitus and the invisible, unconscious coerciveness of intimate apartheid untangles the symbolic violence that blames victims and hides power. It identifies the brutal play of structural forces that express themselves in everyday behavior. (Bourgois, Schönberg 29)