If one is a connoisseur of fine wines, which decidedly I am not, a person could speak knowledgeably about a particular vintage, its bouquet, and its undertones. That kind of discrimination is something to be admired in most cases, that is when it’s not just showing off. Similarly, there are other discriminating tastes one might have or acquire for art or literature, let’s say. But then there’s that other kind of discrimination.
A recent video that came across my social media has sent me into one of my pondering spells. The lady who made it spoke to the differences and intersections of a set of words that she linked together in a most cogent manner, so I went down a particular rabbit hole of thinking about those three words but in a different context from the point she was making. The words she examined were discrimination, prejudice, and racism.
So many words in the English language can have either positive or negative connotations depending on the context in which they are used. Discrimination is just one example.
When a person or a group is treated unfairly simply by virtue of being part of said group, we’ve moved to something quite different from knowing that the writing of Edith Wharton is superior to that of Jacqueline Susann. (I have read practically everything both ladies wrote so you can count on my discrimination here.) In this event, discrimination becomes action, to which all of us should take the appropriate level of indignation.
Prejudice can be relatively harmless, too, in some cases. Parents certainly are entitled to be biased in favor of their children, and Lord knows, most of us Texans are prejudiced unabashedly in favor of the Lone Star state. But then there’s that other kind of prejudice.
Miss Merriam Webster defines it as “an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, or a race, or their supposed characteristics.” As the lady in the video pointed out, there’s a fine line between thinking some kind of way and taking action on that thinking. That is the difference between prejudice and discrimination. When that attitude or action is based on race, you got racism. It’s not really all that hard to connect the dots.
While her video was specific to racism used against Black people, the rabbits I found in my hole pointed out to me that this same pattern, this same big ugly circle of racism, prejudice, and discrimination, bears a striking similarity to all the other “-isms” that plague us, individually and collectively, even when they are not technically an “-ism.” It’s there with sexism, anti-Semitism, and ageism. It’s there with prejudice and discrimination against groups based on ethnicity. It’s there with the phobias, too. Islamophobia and homophobia follow the same path.
It would be a tad facile to see this pattern as something external to ourselves. Something we would never participate in personally because we’re above that kind of ignorant thinking, right? (Would you like that sarcasm with a side of elitism?)_We may try actively to avoid this in the big picture but still do it in more subtle ways. Why we choose to section ourselves off with almost surgical precision is for the psychologists to explain. But we can observe it almost daily.
We join one group and avoid another. We belong to one political party or the other, or we join the non-partisan who call themselves independents. About 45% of American adults identify as “I think for myself independents” and thereby join a group larger than that of either major political party. We separate ourselves into blue, white, and pink collars. We divide into the religious and non-religious, then subdivide based on which religion we follow. Catholicism and Protestantism is just the first cut before breaking off into individual denominations. Evangelic Christians need to be further divided, as their practice and, more importantly, their voting behavior differs by race. Another circle completed.
By the time we get through slicing, dicing, and julienning ourselves, we may end up as a majority of one. We may believe that we believe that we are all equal, but we too often need to be more equal than others. That, of course, is prejudice, and we’re right back where we started.
I don’t want to buy the world a Coke, nor do I intend to sing “Kum ba yah.” But I ask with Billy Preston, “Will it go round in circles?” I think maybe it does.
