The Ambiguous Faces of Bias and Discrimination

The Ambiguous Faces of Bias and Discrimination

We all discriminate and have biases.

When we choose what color to wear, when we pick one political candidate over another, when we buy certain apples instead of other apples, we’re discriminating and exercising our biases. It’s only when discrimination relates to race, gender, national origin, religion and, lately, to sexual orientation that it becomes societally ugly and unacceptable.

To its great credit, America has evolved significantly from our bad old, bigoted days yet bias still exists in large part because people are people and don’t necessarily think their beliefs reflect bias as much as realism and they feel their views are both warranted and true. Then, too, bias and discrimination are often in the eyes of the beholder.

Complicating matters even more, some bias and discrimination are considered less vile than others.

In America’s bad old days, African-Americans were consigned to the back seats of buses, women were welcomed as corporate secretaries but not as company bosses, “Irish Need Not Apply” signs decorated doors of employers, Jews were allowed to loan us money but not own banks, and people like Chaz Bono were regarded as freaks, not dancers.

To be sure, outdated ideas haven’t all died away but whether they are all intrinsically “bad” is debatable.

The Cherokee Nation, a 300,000-strong tribe of semi-autonymous American Indians, just decided that only Cherokees are qualified to vote in their elections, which seems reasonable enough. However, that decision effectively disenfranchised some 2,800 “freedmen,” non-Cherokee descendants of slaves owned by tribesmen prior to the Civil War.

Doing what it does best, the federal government interfered in Cherokee internal affairs on behalf of the 2,800 and the tribal elections are now in Indian limbo.

Was the decision by the Cherokee Nation discriminatory? On its face, apparently so although it would seem that voting in Cherokee elections should be restricted to Cherokees, no? Was it bias? Only if tribal unity is a biased concept.

Demonstrating that the bane of political correctness is not confined to our shores, a more transparent and reprehensible discrimination with no shades of ambiguity is occurring in England. There, in the name of political correctness, children as young as three are being labeled for life with the stigma of being racists and homophobes for the sin of, well, acting like kids.

The Brits have seen fit to register over 30,000 mostly primary-school age children in a government database, a tainted record which will follow them wherever they go, due to such horrid schoolyard infractions as calling another child a “broccoli head” and for improperly using the terms “gay,” “lesbian,” and “gaylord.” . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5471.)