Discrimination
Unjustified distinctions depriving people of rights or opportunities.
Last updated
Discrimination means making unjustified distinctions between people based on the groups, classes, or categories they belong to—or are thought to belong to—often in a way that denies them their legal or human rights. The group in question might be defined by traits like race, gender, height, age, class, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. This practice typically results in unfair treatment according to perceived statuses, such as ethnic, racial, gender, or religious categories, and it involves withholding opportunities or privileges from one group that are available to another. Discriminatory traditions, policies, ideas, practices, and laws appear in many countries and institutions worldwide, even in places where such discrimination is widely condemned.
Quick Facts
- Etymology
- From Latin discriminat- 'distinguished between'
- from discriminare
- from discrimen 'distinction'
- from discernere
- First recorded in english
- Early 17th century
- Former synonym
- Discernment
- tact
- culture (as in 'taste and discrimination')
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
The term discriminate appeared in the early 17th century in the English language, from the Latin discriminat- 'distinguished between'. Before the American Civil War, it was a synonym for discernment, tact and culture, generally a laudable attribute; to 'discriminate against' being commonly disparaged. Since the Civil War, the term generally evolved in American English usage as an understanding of prejudicial treatment of an individual based solely on their race, later generalized as membership in a certain socially disfavored group or social category.
Reader's Guide
Moral philosophers have defined discrimination using a moralized definition: acts, practices, or policies that wrongfully impose a relative disadvantage or deprivation on persons based on their membership in a salient social group. This is a comparative definition—an individual need not be actually harmed to be discriminated against; they just need to be treated worse than others for some arbitrary reason. Discrimination also develops into a source of oppression, the action of recognizing someone as 'different' so much that they are treated inhumanly and degraded.
The United Nations stance includes the statement that discriminatory behaviors take many forms, but all involve some form of exclusion or rejection. Types of discrimination include ageism (most pervasive form of prejudice in the UK population, according to a University of Kent survey), caste discrimination (affecting an estimated 250 million people worldwide, mainly in parts of Asia and Africa), citizenship or nationality discrimination, class discrimination, disability discrimination (also called ableism or disablism), excellence discrimination, language discrimination, and name-based discrimination. Countervailing measures such as quotas have been used to redress the balance in favor of those believed to be current or past victims of discrimination, though these attempts have often been met with controversy and sometimes called reverse discrimination.
Did You Know?
- A University of Kent survey found that 29% of respondents had suffered from age discrimination, a higher proportion than for gender or racial discrimination.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Discrimination?
Discrimination is the act of drawing unjustified lines between people based on the group, class, or category they belong to—or are assumed to belong to—thereby denying them rights or opportunities. It operates through perceived statuses such as race, gender, age, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.
What is Discrimination known for?
Its core mechanism is withholding opportunities, privileges, or fair treatment from one group while extending them to another. It can manifest in legal, economic, social, or institutional settings, and its effects compound over time through systemic structures.
When did Discrimination first appear in the record?
The word traces back to the Latin root meaning 'distinguished between,' first surfacing in English in the early 17th century. Its meaning shifted dramatically after the American Civil War, when it came to denote prejudicial treatment rooted in race before broadening to any socially disfavored group membership.
More in Social Identity & Prejudice
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Discrimination (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Word definitions: the Codexery glossary, each quoted from its Wikipedia article.
Spotted an error? Know more?
Reader corrections go straight into our review queue. Suggest an edit · How this site is sourced