Recognising discrimination
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Discrimination is the unjust or prejudicial treatment of people on the grounds of their background or personal characteristics such as ethnicity, age, sex, ability, or sexual orientation.
We often think of discrimination as instances of interpersonal discrimination such as hate speech or bullying – often on the basis of personal characteristics or social identities such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and other social identifiers. But if we want to tackle discrimination and enhance inclusion, we must go further and look at more institutional and structural forms of discrimination, such as hiring practices, or whose history is being taught and not taught in school textbooks. Discrimination and inequalities do not happen by chance. Behind all types of discrimination is a global history that has politically, economically, and societally created arbitrary differences and justifications for treating people unequally, which continues up to the present day.
Social identity. Every person holds many social identities such as age, gender, religious or spiritual affiliation, class, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, ‘race’, ability, nationality and ethnicity. While certain social identities can easily be seen, others are not visible. Each social identity holds a certain amount of power.
Discrimination is closely connected to privilege and power, and how they manifest in society. As part of society, we belong to different social categories and social identities. People that have social identities with a lot of power are privileged and often part of the majority status, while those who have social identities with less power are more disadvantaged and often part of a minority status.
Our social identities give us a sense of who we are. But they also present what we mean to others. Some identities are given to us by birth, some we acquire through life. With some we identify, and some can be put upon us by others, based on our looks, accent or background, even though we do not identify with them. How much power each identity has is a social construct that was developed and established through history by dominant groups of people and can differ from society to society. As all of us have many social identities, we often belong to dominant and marginalised groups at the same time.
Powerful social identities are often taken for granted and we are rarely aware of them in our everyday lives. For example, as a white person, one can go through life in many western societies without being much aware of how whiteness is influencing one’s life because it is a privilege to be racialised as white in many societies. But if one is not white and is discriminated against because of it, one inevitably becomes aware of racialisation. Then one notices it every day, many times a day. Young people experience hate speech and discrimination on personal, institutional and/or systemic levels because of social identities (or presumed ones) that are seen and perceived as less valued.
Those of us who are so lucky and privileged that they don’t personally experience much or any discrimination because of their social identities can even believe that society already is equal. From where they look, society might actually seem to be inclusive and equal. But those who encounter or witness discrimination, or read studies about discrimination, know that minority groups often experience discrimination. Our societies are far from being fair.
Privilege means advantages or benefits that are granted or made available to only a particular group, often at the expense of others. Privileges operate on the personal, interpersonal and institutional levels.
Whether we are aware of it or not, many of us hold certain privileges based on the different social identities we have. The nature of privilege is such that they are often invisible to those who have it. It is important to emphasise that privileges are most often unearned. It is a common misconception to think that everyone just needs to work hard to have access to these privileges since they usually are granted to us without much of our own effort.
Some social identities have more power than others. Having power is not always a result of an active choice of a conscious intention. Similar to having privileges, we often end up holding power simply because of the different social identities. What we choose to do with that power in our daily lives is what makes the difference – whether we are actively causing inequality, passively allowing it to happen, or actively fighting against it and building equality and peace instead.
Youth workers often work with diverse groups of young people. This diversity gives us an opportunity to widen our horizons.
We need to recognise the inequalities and discrimination around us so that we can prevent these inequalities from escalating. A useful framework to think about this is with the Pyramid of Hate. This is an educational tool developed by the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish-American human rights organisation in the US, in relation to lessons learnt from the Holocaust. This pyramid offers a useful visual image to illustrate how the seeds of hate can grow from biased ideas to hateful violence, if they go unchecked and become normalised and are not tackled with and even promoted. This pyramid is not saying that biased attitudes or acts of bias would automatically lead to violence, but it is claiming that violence often has its seeds on biased attitudes.