Discrimination is not a bad thing.
Discrimination (to distinguish or note differences, discernment) is useful. A finely tuned sense of discrimination can help you tell the difference between (for example) meaningful political discourse and a load of steaming inflammatory bullshit.
People will always make discriminations about characteristics that belong to some of the people around them and not others. Do you remember when you were a child? I remember quite well at the age of seven becoming aware that my friend’s black skin meant something more than its actual color to the adults around me.
The question is what people choose to do with the discriminations they make.
I tend to believe that racism, in the sense of appreciating the beauty of another whose beauty is unlike your own, is a discrimination that is part of being a sentient and esthetically aware human being.
Racism in the sense of exclusion and depriving of others of the best fruits of society on the basis of an arbitrary physical characteristic is a contingent result of history and economics. History cannot be changed, but economics can.
In American society, wealth (and the power that goes along with it) is the key factor to ending racism in the bad sense. The more steeply progressive the tax system, the more social and racial equality will result. GOP and libertarian low-tax schemes are inherently racist, in that they perpetuate the status quo.
The way to end racism is to eat the rich!!
2 comments
The definition of discrimination is generalizable, and acts of discrimination are differentiatiable. Differentiation is often expressed by a value judgement, a word like “bad” or a number such as $640 billion or its very execution. Differentiation and discrimination are axiomatically synonymous.
Price discrimination, for example, has meaningful applications to ordinary decisions. Firstly, someone within a firm defines and derives classes of a thing. Then, someone actually calculates their costs and projects variable preferences for a good or service into the marketplace as priced. Those preferences are typically signaled and recognized by the various packagings and various placements –and exclusions– of that one thing among stores. One brassiere may be purchased at different prices from sample, discount, or chain sellers. Seats on the same plane are priced along a spectrum. The shop around the corner stocks Colgate but no OralB toothbrushes, Lays potato chips but no potatoes. In the UK isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol is sold only by licensed chemists.
All ground beef: many options, different values.
All shampoo: many options, different values.
All art work: many options, different values.
All people: many options, different values.
strikes me as a wholly profit oriented commodity. When where you last asked by government, private industry, survey, etc about your race. No longer do they simply ask if you are white, black, asian or spanish now they really insert the rectal probe and get really specific about your exact and detailed personal race history. I have taken up the personal policy of either lying or checking the refuse to answer box. In fact in recent surveys the establishment that my son is in fact my biological son involved at least three separate questions. It does strike me as odd because if we are all supposedly “equal” then why the obsession with detailed classification of people based upon race. I do believe Nazi Germany was also obsessed with detailing people according to their race. Something of an attitude coming from someplace bothers me more than the normal problem of people not trusting each other because they are different.