Why is discrimination still a thing? (An opinion)
Author Notes:
I have finished writing a thing on archive and I wanted to add stuff here, so here is my opinion on something.
It is kind of political, so if you do not want to read it, it is perfectly fine! I just wanted to get
something out there.
In my opinion, there are three main ideas when people think of discrimination; sexism, classism, and racism. We know that those things are bad, yet they still are entrenched and deep-rooted in society. Why? If we have made strides to fix them, why are they still prevalent? Furthermore, when we had revolutions that tried to lay that to rest like the Russian Revolution with classism and actions like the American Civil War with racism, why does it still rear its ugly head, in either casual conversation or in the monoliths of anonymous objective government? I think that it is because of a decision matrix that creates these disparities despite all our efforts.
The decision matrix is:
an idea that the reason why discrimination exists in environments meant to starve said discrimination is due to the lack of abundant resources that cause personal prejudices which enter into decisions that propagate across society.
Let's break it down. When I say the lack of abundant resources I point to the paradox that defines economics: we have infinite wants, but not infinite resources. The world will never have enough resources, despite how much money we can muster and how much collective will we have to fix it. There will simply never be enough stuff. That is, the stuff that we want to have, not just simple needs. Socialist states like the Soviet Union proved that we can have basic resources like food, water and housing universally available for a whole population. The problem is that such systems cannot satiate a person's wants. Wants are niche, specific, and hard to create; we may all need a general product like a phone, but all of us want different types of phones. There will never be enough production capacity to fulfil that, and no amount of conditioning will remove human want, physical or emotional.
As there are no infinite resources, aspects of society may become a zero-sum game: when one group's wants are satiated, another is deprived of that relief. This then creates the personal prejudice that may come about. Most people do not see their want being unfulfilled as the reality of economics, but an optional, unwanted removal of certain aspects of life that are caused, in part, by another person. Conversely, if a group has their wants fulfilled and sees another has different wants or their wants not fulfilled, they may declare biased supremacy over said group based merely on them having a specific resource that another group does not have. This bias, as in a belief that disproportionately affects a decision, does not start group-wide, however. It starts personally: if the family next door does not have money to throw an extravagant birthday party while the other family can, the parents may view those parents as inferior or not giving the child the respect they deserve. The reason, in my view, why this is labeled in terms of characteristics like race, sex and class is because it something tangible: one cannot see the financial situation at first glance, but they can see their skin tone. As the brain likes patterns, it may latch on a specific skin colour or political affiliation with certain reductionist characteristics, which makes it easier to justify to oneself why one may have specific biases.
This bias pervades how people think. Personally, I sometimes gloss over or intensely critique conservative text and opinion simply because I have a bias against conservatism. Bias, even as much as you read diversely, will cement in our brains and rarely change when they are set. Influences from childhood, the media and activities exposed to people usually subconsciously sets how they view society, and their bias toward certain groups. This prejudice is in most people, even if it is not race, it may be political affiliation or your opinion on how people eat, or style their neocities website. People think those things 'say' something about the person, but mostly is just an arbitrary characteristic of a person. While it is an important aspect of determining a decision, there is also the environment as well. The environment mainly describes the area, context and mood the decision takes place. A misogynist may make a decision that supresses their bias against women (although not fully invalidating it) in the workplace because of the backlash from HR and other people in the workplace.
After the environment, the bias, and the thing to be decided on is set, the decision takes place. This is, usually, a personal decision: someone may move out of the city to a predominantly white neighbourhood, a politburo member may give more benefits to another politburo member than someone who may need it more in their area. The reason why it is person and not social, even in cultures that value the group over the individual, is because people want to accentuate or sustain their own position, when position means the resources that are already there for them. The reason why it is this way in collectivist cultures is because the decision-maker may unilaterally believe, especially if it is a leader, that their decision may help in sustaining or advancing the group's position. The bias is used, among other things, as a determiner to this cost-benefit analysis. If a person likes pizza, and they are given a pizza or something unknown, they are more likely to pick the pizza as they do not know if the mystery food deprives their position, while they can be certain that the pizza will at least maintain it. This decision then affects the environment that will input into the next decision: if the chef knows that they are less likely to pick pizza, they will make more pizza, which sustains the bias of liking pizza.
These environmental decisions propagate among society. Decisions rarely have an isolated impact as they recreate the environment we live in. Leaders who make a decision on supporting a specific policy will affect millions, the decision to move to a different area will affect hundreds of thousands, the decision to pick a specific food item at the local restaurant will affect your local block. This then sustains the bias. There are two levels of effect, in my view: there is the personal and the institutional. Personal effects are done between people, and do not affect policy or the social make up of society in a universal way. If someone is casually sexist with the boys in the group chat, it affects that environment, as sexism is no longer seen as "weird", which may affect the way those people interact with themselves or the rest of society. There are then institutional effects, which may affect policy or the way people live, such as an elections. The bias towards a certain party may make people vote for them, which then causes them to enact policies that sustains that bias. The two types are cyclical however; if a government position is to outlaw the use of Comic Sans, people may have a bias against Comic Sans, which sustains the institutional bias against Comic Sans. It is worth pointing out that institutional bias comes from personal bias. As people experience things, they form that bias that will metastasise into institutional bias. The bias against Comic Sans had to come from somewhere, in order for it to metastasise into institutional bias.
A good example of this is white flight and the nature of the boom of Suburban America from the 1960s to the 1990s. The racism associated with white flight was not necessarily because people decided en masse to move to the suburbs to avoid black and brown people, it was simply that personal prejudice against specific races made people move to the suburbs, which then became an institutional bias as elected politicians focused more on those suburbs as they had high-earning, high-power voters that can muster the resources needed to fight them in the primary. There were laws when white flight happened like ending of separate-but-equal and the Civil Rights Act, but the personal bias of racism did not end, it just manifested from overt racism to behavioural traits that would culminate in activities such as white flight. The same thing happened in the socialist Soviet Union. Defisitnye tovary existed in the Soviet Union despite the promise of goods being available by the state through socialism because resources were limited and people who had power such as in the politburo wanted to maintain the power by giving it to other people who already had existing resources as they had the political capital to effect change in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
The problem with trying to end or at least alter the decision matrix is that it will be hard, even if legal change is done through revolution. Iran still has people who are against the government, even though they had used violent measures in order to get people on the same theocratic consensus. The fun thing is it at least gives me (and maybe you) some hope that I do affect the outcome of society, even if it is just as simple as buying a certain book or going to a certain place. However small, knowing that you do not need to do drastic actions to perform change in society is comforting in a way.
What we can do in order to change or help the decision matrix is through education and exposure. People in younger generations usually are alright with certain changes that are made in previous generations because that is the reality that they grew up with. Biases are created from the existing environments and if the existing environment, although tentative, likes a specific idea then the following generation will most likely accept and see that idea and the biases as normal. Education is also key. By showing the material impact of specific biases through a textbook, it helps show nuance and creates better biases that can be overwhelmed by the environment. This is because, in my opinion, a bias that can be overwhelmed by the environment is better than a bias that is obstinate despite the environment that it lives in. Also, something personal that you can do is act in a way that certain biases are removed among your friends. Tell your friends that you do not like a certain thing or that you are uncomfortable with certain discriminatory actions, which makes them realise that a certain bias may not be conducive and refrain from said bias.