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Discrimination, Sociology Of

Discrimination, conscious or subconscious, differentiates between individuals based on race, caste, creed, religion, age, gender, health status, physical disabilities, economic circumstances, or even their sexual preferences. Students often study the topic of lawbased discrimination under the subject of constitutional law or even ethics, the discipline concerned with what is morally good or bad, right or wrong.

History and Extent of Discrimination

Discrimination has occurred widely throughout history and across societies. Although many forms of discrimination are prevalent, those most frequently causing serious social problems have occurred based on race or caste. In general, discrimination based on race exists more often in the Occident, while that based on caste exists in the Orient. African Americans, who earlier had lived under a system disparagingly called Jim Crow, achieved effective equal legal status only in the 1960s.

Discrimination was sometimes justified on very flimsy grounds. Some Christian ministers and theologians taught that God supported racial segregation, favored whites as His chosen people, and cursed blacks to be servants. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. The famous English short story writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) went to the extent of calling blacks and other people of color the “white man's burden,” implying that people of color have no capacity to govern or progress and that it was thus the burden of whites to do so.

In the Orient, discrimination exists more often based on caste. Among the communities most frequently discriminated against are the Dalits, or so-called untouchables, of South Asia, including Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan; the Buraku of Japan; the Osu of Nigeria's Igbo people; and certain select groups in Senegal and Mauritania. According to a rough estimate, over 250 million people worldwide continue to suffer from a hidden apartheid of segregation, modernday slavery, and other extreme forms of discrimination, exploitation, and violence.

Reactions to Discrimination and Criminal Justice

Discrimination often leads to grievances that in turn lead to protest and rebellion. In the United States, for instance, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in California in 1966 formed the Black Panther Party to address black grievances. In the early 1990s, it transformed into the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense (NBPP). Such efforts are mirrored by the efforts of white supremacists, whose organizations have sprung up or, like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), reemerged to counter black resistance.

Contemporary Americans remember police discrimination against blacks by the 1991 beating of Rodney King by several white Los Angeles police officers. King became a symbol of police brutality against blacks. When the four officers were acquitted a year after the beating, the city erupted in riots in the hours following the jury's verdict. In the four days of violence in South Central Los Angeles, 55 people died, 2,383 others suffered injury, and the police arrested more than 8,000. In an effort to end the riots, King issued his famous plea: “Can we all get along?” In a second, this time federal, prosecution in 1993, a jury found two of the officers guilty of violating King's civil rights. The officers served thirty months in federal prison.

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