Some people might consider it a thing of the past. Others might even avoid its existence. There are always those who fight against it and those who fight in its favor. What we all should have in mind is that to this day, discrimination still exists, and it lurks in the corners of every society in the world. Of course, there are various reasons why it still exists and a surprisingly big amount of types of discrimination that continue to be used to this day despite our breakthroughs and self-awareness about life.
There is race discrimination that segregates people because of their ethnicity. For starters, some people have the habit of relating a crook or a bad person with someone who deviates from the physical appearance of what is considered an ordinary person there. Others might find odd when someone participates or works at a place where the majority of the people are one of the two genders. Some even use different phrases that subtly excludes the person being mentioned. There are several other ways in which this type of discrimination lives. But the reason that it still lives on is because of the number of people that still do it quite frequently due to the fact that some of them might not even notice that they are doing it.
In Puerto Rico, most people tend to discriminate against Dominican people. From racist jokes to subtle comments that diminish their capacity to do things. Despite having people still doing this, there is of course people who are aware of it and have made the effort to stop it. In other places and countries, countless people have fought against it too. From historical figures to every type of person has tried or is trying their best to take down the different types of discrimination from the face of the earth.
One of the most notorious ones around the world in the present is the discrimination of a person’s sexual orientation. People treat them as if they were not human, someone to watch out for or not trust. In reality, we are all human beings and deserve the same chances to do anything that we choose to do. Those who discriminate them seem to only think about themselves, thinking that the other person is different from them and they cannot possibly have or deserve a happy life. Thinking a lot about yourself tends to be the source of pride and arrogance when in contrast, thinking of one’s self less is the core of humility; like Clive Lewis once said. And by doing so we accept people for who they truly are and erase the toxic action of judging from our system.
There other ways of judging or discriminating someone. One of the more subtle ones is career discrimination. In the society we live in now, students tend to choose as a major for college, the most popular ones because of their salary, popularity or even peer pressure. When someone goes with the less popular ones or the ones that have a lower salary, they are underestimated and aren’t treated with respect. The problem with this is that every career or profession is important for our society. They should all be treated and valued the same way because all of them contribute to the world and countries in one way or another. This problem mostly exists because people want to be pleased and they expect things to happen according to and in favor of the way they see the world; again, these are the qualities of an arrogant or prideful person and the solution to that has already been addressed.
Despite the solution being quite simple, for some reason, it has not been taken into account. In places where the main goal is to accept everyone for who they are, they end up discriminating too and that is in people who are religious. Religious groups discriminate people who do not form part of their group as well as with people who are not religious at all and vice versa. That does not mean that every religious people behave like this, like all things, it is only a select few people that choose to think this way, but they still leave a mark on society.
Society is a very fragile thing that can affect each and every life that forms part of it, for good or for worse. People who see themselves as superior to others can harm someone in a wide range of ways, of which they can be all put together in the mental and physical aspect. Most of these types of people have what it is known as a superiority complex. It consists in someone that needs other people around so that they can feed their ego by making themselves feel superior to them. People can be harmed by someone like this when they are discriminated by their physical appearance. This can lead to a wide range of problems with the person being affected by it, most of them can even be life threatening if the toxic interaction persists.
One that is fueled by toxic interactions is sex discrimination. This type of discrimination has been existing way before America was seen by the Europeans. Women have been the ones to suffer from this despite their current fights against it in the present and in the past. They are not treated as someone that is capable of doing things that mostly men do because of the delicate image that has been given to them throughout history, ignoring the fact that we are way past that and know a lot more than we did back then.
Discrimination is one of the many problems that we have today creeping into our society. People from all parts of the world suffer from it. There are people who fight against this curse, but most of the time they are outnumbered or overpowered by the people who are supposed to guide this beautiful world into peace.
Author: Alejandro Sosa from University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
