[lzdaevao] Discriminating by unchangeable

Hypothesize that every feature about a person he or she cannot easily change will become something society discriminates by.

Is it true?  Previously we noted certain ethnicities seem less discriminated in American society.

Famous features: skin color, language/dialect/accent, gender, attitude toward sex and sexual promiscuity, sexual orientation, weight, fashion sense, courtship rituals, physical disabilities, mental disabilities, other social class markers (which is a tautology).  In other cultures: religion (where religious membership is important and conversion is difficult), caste (another tautology).

Previously, things one cannot change about oneself because of psychological reasons.

Hair color is an example of a feature that is easy to change, and not much discrimination happens by it.

If it is true, which way is the causality?

It could be that discrimination happens for some exogenous reason, and society teaches us to notice the features society discriminates by.  That is, it is an illusion that we discriminate by everything we can discern: what we can discern is what society has taught us to discriminate by.  If so, we would expect there to be many examples of difficult-to-change features that a person could distinguish or learn to distinguish, but most people in a society do not.  I have heard that Japanese society discriminates between Japanese-looking versus Chinese-looking facial features, but American society does not.

The other possible direction of causality is interesting: if true, society inherently needs to discriminate, perhaps to achieve a distribution of labor, so latches on to whatever unchangeable features are available to accomplish it.  (Which feature leads to which labor assignment is an unsolved problem: politics.)  If true, the consequences are profound: social movements to decrease discrimination by certain features (e.g., skin color) will not be successful, because society has an inherent need to discriminate, somehow.  The optimistic elimination of one form of discrimination will simply give rise to another.