Examples of Prejudice and Discrimination

Here are some examples of prejudice and discrimination:

• Sometimes expecting different things of men and women and treating them accordingly.
• Believing that the differences are complementary and adapted to enduring unions that are basic to everyday life, social order, and the continuation of the species.
• Giving specific legal recognition and support to such unions.
• Believing that different peoples—Westerners, South Asians, Jews, Irishmen, Fukienese peasants—have different qualities and ways of doing things.
• Feeling more or less attracted to one group or another, feeling most at home with one’s own group, and feeling at times that there are groups one would rather avoid.
• Taking religious, ethnic, and other communal ties into account in choosing basic affiliations like whom to marry, where to live, and whom to work with.

Until very recently, such things have always counted as ordinary good sense, so much so that they hardly ever surfaced as issues. “Sexist” and “homophobic” are notoriously post-’60s coinages. Even “racist” is a fairly new word,1 its extremely broad application still more so, and until recently “bigot” had to do with narrowness and obstinacy in matters of opinion rather than a tendency to make distinctions in matters like race. Nonetheless, distinctions such as sex, religion, and inherited community that have always ordered human life are now treated as moral horrors. Ordinary examples of discrimination like the ones mentioned must be extirpated.2 Social arrangements that matter must be purged of any trace of them and based instead on neutral bureaucratic and market criteria. We are allowed to take natural and traditional ties into account only in personal settings that grow ever more narrow, or in order to cancel out effects such ties might otherwise have.3
Nondiscrimination claims to appeal to simple reason and justice, but it imposes demands that are sometimes more than a little odd:

• Military experience can count in employment decisions and the like, but not the experience of being raised a man rather than a woman, or even the consequences of hundreds of millions of years of sexual dimorphism.
• Employers may distinguish between college graduates and dropouts or even Yale and Harvard graduates, but not Mayflower descendants and Mexican immigrants, except to the extent that immigrants need a boost to help them overcome disadvantages.
• Habits, attitudes, and loyalties can matter, but only if they have no connection to cultural community. You can insist that new employees attend diversity training and take into account their commitment to multiculturalism, but not consider whether they are churchgoers. The latter approach might get you better employees who work more happily together, but it is illegal.
• Schools can exclude people from teaching irrespective of individual merit if they have not taken useless education courses, but it is a crushing objection to sex discrimination in the military that some women are bigger, stronger, braver, or more stoic than some men.
• An employer can demand a bachelor’s degree for non-technical entry-level positions, but not (in general) look at IQ or criminal records in deciding who to hire. Some minorities come out badly on the latter criteria, and they are less
amenable than educational certifications to affirmative action fudges. The result is that they cannot be used unless shown to be job-related by standards that are usually impractical to satisfy beyond risk of lawsuits.
• In more and more settings it is illegal to treat sex as relevant to family relationships. In some places it must be ignored even in situations like adoption that involve utterly powerless parties with no choice in the matter.