Discrimination

• 1. Introduction

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  Discrimination is the process of making unjustified distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they belong or are perceived to belong. Usually it works in a way that deprives them of their legal or human rights. The group might be marked out by race, gender, age, class, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. A person does not even have to be actually harmed to be discriminated against. They just need to be treated worse than others for some arbitrary reason.

  The word once meant something almost flattering. Before its modern sense became near-universal, to have discrimination was to have discernment, tact, and culture, as in the phrase taste and discrimination. So how did a synonym for good judgment come to name one of the deepest sources of human oppression? And what happens when randomly assigned colors, in a quiet computer experiment, are enough to make people start treating each other unequally? The chapters ahead follow discrimination from a Latin verb to the laboratory, through the many forms it takes, and into the laws written to hold it back.

• 2. From Discernment To Harm

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  The term discriminate appeared in the English language in the early 17th century. It comes from the Latin discriminat-, meaning distinguished between, from the verb discriminare, from discrimen, a distinction, and ultimately from discernere, which corresponds to the English to discern. The roots point to an act of telling things apart, not an act of injustice.

  Since the American Civil War, the word shifted in American English usage. It came to describe prejudicial treatment of an individual based solely on their race, and was later generalized to membership in a certain socially disfavored group or social category. For a long time before that shift, to discriminate against someone was commonly disparaged, while discrimination on its own was treated as a laudable attribute.

  Moral philosophers have since pinned the word down with a moralized definition. Under this approach, discrimination is wrong by definition. It names acts, practices, or policies that wrongfully impose a relative disadvantage or deprivation on persons because of their membership in a salient social group. This sits apart from a non-moralized definition, where the act is not automatically wrong. Consider someone who donates to help orphans but gives less to children of a particular race out of a racist attitude. They act in a discriminatory way even though they still benefit the children they discriminate against.

• 3. The Many Faces Of Exclusion

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  Caste discrimination affects an estimated 250 million people worldwide, according to UNICEF and Human Rights Watch. It is mainly prevalent in parts of Asia, including India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Japan, and in parts of Africa. India alone counted 200 million Dalits, or Scheduled Castes, once known as untouchables.

  Ageism, the discrimination and stereotyping based on a person's age, is most often aimed at elderly people, or at adolescents and children. Joanna Lahey, a professor at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, found that firms are more than 40% more likely to interview a young adult job applicant than an older one. In a survey for the University of Kent in England, 29% of respondents said they had suffered age discrimination, a higher share than reported gender or racial discrimination. Dominic Abrams, a social psychology professor there, concluded that ageism is the most pervasive form of prejudice in the UK population.

  Roma and Sinti are considered among the most discriminated ethnic groups in the world, having suffered mass genocide, sterilization, and enslavement. Rohingya people are also described as among the world's most discriminated-against groups. Native Americans experienced one of the largest genocides and ethnic cleansings in history, and Black people and Jews are named as vulnerable ethnic groups as well.

  Discrimination based on a person's name can hinge on its meaning, its pronunciation, its uniqueness, its gender affiliation, and its racial affiliation. Researchers note that real-world recruiters spend an average of just six seconds reviewing each resume before their initial fit or no-fit decision, and a name is one of the six things they focus on most. France has made it illegal to see a candidate's name when screening the initial shortlist.

• 4. Faith And The Ghetto

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  Between 1933 and 1945, the Jewish population of Germany and much of Europe was subjected to discrimination under Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. People were forced to live in ghettos, wear an identifying star of David on their clothes, and were sent to concentration and death camps in rural Germany and Poland. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 set those of Jewish faith apart as supposedly inferior to the Christian population.

  Christian authorities had long restricted the occupations Jewish people could hold. Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to religious Jews, pushing them into roles considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending, work tolerated only as a necessary evil. The number of Jews permitted to live in different places was limited, and they were concentrated in ghettos and banned from owning land.

  Religious discrimination persists in law and policy around the world. In Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims may not publicly practice their religions and cannot enter Mecca and Medina. In the Maldives, those expressing beliefs other than Islam may face imprisonment of up to five years or house arrest, fines ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 rufiyaa, and deportation. In Myanmar, 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have been forced to become refugees in Bangladesh because of institutionalized religious discrimination, including a government refusal to grant them citizenship that leaves them stateless.

• 5. Bodies And Identities

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  Sexism is discrimination based on a person's sex or gender, sometimes carrying the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another. In its extreme forms it can foster sexual harassment, rape, and other sexual violence. Gender discrimination, which can encompass sexism, is tied closely to workplace inequality and may grow out of social or cultural customs and norms.

  Intersex persons face discrimination because of innate, atypical sex characteristics, and several jurisdictions have moved to protect them. South Africa was the first country to explicitly add intersex to legislation, as part of the attribute of sex. Australia was the first to add an independent attribute of intersex status. Malta was the first to adopt the broader framework of sex characteristics, through legislation that also ended modifications to the sex characteristics of minors carried out for social and cultural reasons.

  Sexual orientation, a predilection for homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality, exposes many people to prejudice the source calls homophobia. One study found its sample of heterosexuals more prejudiced against asexual people than against homosexual or bisexual people. A 2009 report published by ILGA, based on research by Daniel Ottosson at Sodertorn University College in Stockholm, found that of 80 countries that still consider homosexuality illegal, five carry the death penalty for homosexual activity, and two do so in some regions. The report described this as State sponsored homophobia. In 2011, the United Nations passed its first resolution recognizing LGBT rights.

• 6. Color In The Laboratory

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  Economist Yanis Varoufakis argued in 2013 that discrimination based on utterly arbitrary characteristics evolves quickly and systematically in the experimental laboratory, and that neither classical game theory nor neoclassical economics can explain it. The claim rests on an experiment he ran with Shaun Hargreaves-Heap in 2002.

  Volunteers played a computer-mediated, multiround hawk-dove game. At the start of each session, each participant was randomly assigned a color, either red or blue. In every round a player learned only the color of the opponent and nothing else. A discriminatory convention frequently developed within a session, settling into a Nash equilibrium. Players of the advantaged color consistently played the aggressive hawk strategy against players of the disadvantaged color, who responded with the acquiescent dove strategy. When facing their own color, players of both groups used a mixed strategy.

  The experimenters then added a cooperation option. Disadvantaged players usually cooperated with each other, while advantaged players usually did not. Evolutionary game theory predicts the equilibria of the original hawk-dove game, but it does not explain the emergence of cooperation in the disadvantaged group. Citing earlier psychological work by Matthew Rabin, the pair hypothesized that a norm of differing entitlements emerges across the two groups, and that this norm could define a fairness equilibrium within the disadvantaged group.

• 7. Writing The Rules Back

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  Reverse discrimination is discrimination against members of a dominant or majority group, in favor of members of a minority or historically disadvantaged group. It is often meant to redress social inequalities under which minority groups have had less access to privileges the majority enjoyed. Conceptualizing affirmative action as reverse discrimination became popular in the early to mid 1970s, a period focused on under-representation and on remedying the effects of past discrimination in both government and business.

  Nations have answered with a thicket of statutes. In the United States, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 broadly prohibits workplace discrimination, while the Fair Housing Act of 1968 bars discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. In the United Kingdom, the Equality Act 2010 consolidates and updates the earlier laws that formed the basis of anti-discrimination law. India goes further into its founding document, where Article 15 of the Constitution of India prohibits discrimination on grounds of caste, religion, sex, race, or place of birth.

  International instruments set the broadest frame. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on the 10th of December 1948, holds that everyone is entitled to its rights and freedoms without distinction of any kind. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted on the 21st of December 1965, and entered into force on the 4th of January 1969. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted on the 13th of December 2006, came into force on the 3rd of May 2008, after ratification by the 20th party.