Discrimination. It's not a nice thing in any form and certainly not something to condone. It's good when people raise awareness of it and it certainly comes in lots of forms, whether it's sexism, racism, ageism or anything else. However, these are just subcategories of something that has much deeper roots. If we are in a position to just be complaining about one of these, then we are in a privileged position. It's why I'm reaching the point of losing sympathy with someone who just goes on and on about one of these aspects.
You see there are people who experience discrimination on a level that those of us whinging about being discriminated against would find it hard to conceive. They exist in every country across the world and every culture. They are the ones at the lowest level of the class or caste system. They are the ones so overlooked that they are often the targets of abusers and people traffickers because even if attacks are reported or they are reported as missing to authorities often nothing is done because they're considered as no loss to society. They are often viewed as lower than the bottom levels of working class.
Where are the activists and protests for these people? They don't even have enough of a voice for that, they're just trying to survive. Even if one of them does try to speak up about injustices being done to them it's easy for them to be smeared and dismissed, because why would you believe someone 'so uncouth and uneducated' anyway? It takes someone much higher up with more influence to even get people to listen and start believing what is happening to them.
Some talk about systemic or subconscious racism, but I believe that this class form of discrimination can more accurately be classed in that way, because it goes so unnoticed and unacknowledged, even in the developed world where we implement anti discrimination laws. A good example of this would be the victims of the grooming, torture and abuse gangs in the UK. We've only been starting to hear more about it over the last couple of decades, yet it has been happening since the 1960s/70s.
It's likely that initially nothing was really done about it because nobody cared enough about the children being taken and/or because it was profitable. Over the years it occasionally found it's way to the surface, usually when a child from a slightly higher class got caught up in it, but it would still end up being hushed and forgotten about. Ironically as voices got louder on the issue, the fact that the victims were majority white girls and the perpetrators were majority men from the South Asian region, particularly Pakistan, brought things into the realm of racial discrimination concerns if authorities moved to do something about it. This only gave more ammunition to racists and anti-islamists to call it a Muslim or Pakistani problem and bring more people to their cause. Yet if this had been nipped in the bud early on perhaps we wouldn't have reached this point and wouldn't be exacerbating discrimination towards Pakistanis and Muslims.
Why is class discrimination prevalent across all cultures? (By figuring this out we are likely getting to the root cause of all discrimination.) I would suggest that it is because it's our natural instinct to not want to feel inferior and the easiest way to accomplish that is to feel like you have others inferior to you. Can even the most altruistic and empathetic of us truly say that we have never compared ourselves to someone and been either sad to discover we don't do something as well as them or a little bit pleased to have done something better than them? We might feel a bit superior or smug about being more intelligent than someone else. With the rise of social media we have the coining of the term "virtue signalling" which suggests that we can even get competitive about being more compassionate than others. I don't think any of us can escape this instinct to try and raise ourselves above others, we can only try to recognise it in ourselves when we do so and not let it manifest into putting others down.
Discrimination can also come from fear and I think this can be harder to deal with on a personal level. It could be fear of being in the same position as the other person, which would make sense in a class/caste system, or it could be fear of strangers and not knowing if they are a threat. If you've had a bad experience from your first encounter with someone from a different background or gender then it would be no surprise to then fear the same experience from others like that. In this regard I find it then ironic that some of the aggressive activism we're seeing with threatening and guilt tripping will likely only make these people even more fearful and can even start to make people who weren't necessarily discriminatory empathise with those who are.
In a way I feel like we shouldn't be nitpicking particular discrimination types until we can sort out the root cause of all discrimination, but is that even possible? Having a hierarchy has been the human survival strategy since time immemorial. If we insist that everyone needs to try and change their way of thinking to override their natural instinct then we start to discriminate against those who can't, because the reality is that some people are more emotion driven than others.
I think activism in this regard has achieved as much as it can. We're all very much aware that discrimination exists, so the question now is what can be done to mitigate it? Certainly one place where discrimination and prejudice of any sort should have no place is within law enforcement, even if that means removing those from it who can't regulate themselves in order to remain impartial. However, this would have to come from the top down and I'm not sure those at the top of the class system want to be judged by the same laws and standards as those lower down.
Can you see a way forward?
