For the fiscal year of 2014, 2,893 charges were filed for discrimination lawsuits. However, discrimination in legal terms seems to be the only definition people seem to know. This has shaped the lens in which we view discrimination in the other facets of society–leaving out the intersection of agency in a meritocracy. People think all discrimination is bad, but it’s exactly because of discrimination that society functions.
In law, discrimination is the act of denying rights, benefits, justice, equitable treatment, or access to facilities available to all others, to an individual or group of people because of their race, sexual orientation, age, gender, handicap or other defining characteristic. Most people tend to agree that constitutionally, all persons should be granted the same rights. This idea is not a radical one, but by looking at social media you’d think America’s the most backward, oppressive country there is.
A lot of that has to do with the bleeding of the legal definition of discrimination into the definition of the practice of discrimination—decision making. The ability to understand that one thing is different from another thing is centric to existence. It’s commonplace nowadays to have everyone’s decisions questioned for the legal definition of discrimination, when “The Prevalence, Distribution, and Mental Health Correlates of Perceived Discrimination in the United States” was published by the American Sociologist Association in 2009 on the connection between mental health and perceived instances of discrimination, 60 percent of people believed they experienced discrimination—of the legal kind—on a daily basis.
The facts just don’t align for this belief to be true. If it were true, the state would be paying so many hundreds of millions per annum in easily won lawsuits. If discrimination were that commonplace, the courts would have determined more than just under 4 percent of those cases filed as having significant cause. However, they didn’t. The lawsuits were heard, and an overwhelming majority of independent juries came back saying the same thing: there was not probable cause for the filing.
The wage-gap has been another hot topic, of which most popularly the 75 cents to a man’s dollar myth began to float around. The wage-gap does indeed exist, but by and large, society immediately jumps to the assumption it must be discrimination that has resulted in this disparity—and they’re half right.
It is precisely because of discrimination that women work fewer hours for the same pay rate as men do, and thus bring home less money annually. It is because of discrimination that women dominate fields of education and caregiving. It is discrimination that a women take maternity leave. Different groups of people in a society are going to have different rationales and respond to different stimuli differently.
We have to celebrate discrimination if we believe in individuality. It is because women are free that they can make different life choices, which results in different life outcomes than men in our country, generally. Without believing in choice and agency, we are not advocating for freedom from oppression, we are promoting a culture of intolerance and oppression.
Have you ever seen the postings around, saying “More women should be engineers?” On what grounds, because they’re women? That’s sexist to decide what a woman should or shouldn’t do because of her sex.
Women should be free to make their own life choices, dictating a quota for any minority is dictating a result—and thus abdicating and devaluing individuality and freedom. Women should be encouraged to pursue career paths that they, as individuals, have decided for themselves. This rationale goes for all groups of people.
This is precisely the reason that there is such tremendous, emotional pushback to movements like feminism, Black Lives Matter and so on—these movements have large, vocal, authoritative figures that try to force “equality” without understanding what equality means.
A forced equality, a quota-equality, is no equality; instead, it is an oppressing force that aims at the throat of the American society–all the while claiming to stitch the U.S’ bleeding wound of race relations. Someone will beg you to suffocate them if you tell them oxygen is poisonous. How nice it is to help them on their way out, and how convenient it is for them to pass on.
Social movements often make the mistake of feeding off intolerance and advocating force. With the pedaling around of factually inaccurate ideas–the wage-gap as a result of legal discrimination, the rape on campus 1-in-4 statistic that invalidly concludes from improperly collected data myths about sexual violence in college, the assertion that unarmed individuals are no longer dangerous–these social movements unintentionally disenfranchise those they claim to champion.
These movements need to be anti-legal discrimination and pro-discrimination or else they do not favor agency. It angers a considerable base of the country when a claim is asserted, manipulated to inspire a certain response from listeners, and conveniently leaves out agency.
What not recognizing the agency of minority groups does is promote the idea that they are meaningless, helpless, victims in life of an insurmountable plight that for some reason can only be solved through expanding the national government.
It is infuriating to the rational mind to sit there and listen to someone, anyone, talk about a person having no individuality. Minorities, as citizens, have the same set of rights as majority citizens do. That’s important to include in a conversation because it is paramount to narrow the focus to effectuate change.
When we don’t choose to narrow our scope, we end up trying to fix things that aren’t broken, and we’ve entered a monotonous labor that manages to not only not fix the right thing—that people are outraged about—and instead to outrage us all by throwing a wrench in a perfectly good bike’s wheel.
Throwing that wrench doesn’t stop a racist bicycler from being a racist and acting on their racism in society, but it does discourage bicycling.
No one wants to bicycle anymore. We don’t want to share lanes, look both ways and use hand signals. We want to go our own ways and just make it through the ride. When we’re not bicycling, it’s incredibly laborious. Everything that relies on the bicyclers’ transportation goes to hell.
We’ve got to get past the training wheels mentality. Should we encourage, empower, inspire and assist people to peddle harder to get to where they want to go, or should we sit on the side of the road and wait for some specialist to agree to modify your bike, on the condition you can only go where they tell you? We should all make the choice ourselves, but we have to be prepared for the scrutiny on our decision on how we’re going to bike.
Barton Kleen
Managing Editor