RE: Sociology and the modern obsession with the "individual"
What evidence is there that no culture had even a notion of an individual prior to some date? The notion that individual persons have specific obligations, responsibilities, and entitlements based on their position within a social structure is common in cultures that predate contact with the West.
More to the thesis of your post, the idea that the notion of the individual is somehow singly responsible for negative social consequences is contradictory when those consequences are considered negative because of their impact on individuals. Homelessness, poverty, discrimination, etc - these are bad because they are things that degrade the experience of individuals in some regard. If they didn't negatively affect individuals, then they wouldn't be negative consequences, and you likely wouldn't care as much about them.
I sense the disagreement is mostly semantic and I am new to this, so I will try to be clearer. You say that "The notion that individual persons have specific obligations, responsibilities, and entitlements based on their position within a social structure is common in cultures that predate contact with the West." This is what I am saying---> these roles and responsibilities were/are BASED off of social structure. What I'm talking about is the Western tendency of putting the individual first (and often without even looking at the social structure).
People exist. That was not the point. That is why I quoted from a sociology textbook early in the post. The individual is a loaded term with historical implications.
The problems you mention are social problems because they have sources that go above the individual. Even if all the people in this country stopped discriminating in their personal lives, institutional discrimination (which is built into our neighborhoods, school systems, wealth) does not just go away. There are some social forces that are practicably untouchable to the individual. And without a collective response, we can't do much about them as individuals.
I also never said this word was solely responsible-- I mention that the notion of individual takes center stage only with the beginnings of capitalism. It is more of a cultural idea that fits the economic system. It keeps us seeing people as "others" and as our competition, blaming the vulnerable for their own problems. The peasants in Europe who lost common land to "private property" were kicked off both forcibly just as they culturally became "free individuals".