Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
That's why we need laws, to level the playing field until the day we all become "perfect" and no longer harbor any prejudices that influence our actions... however long that may take. (I know I'm not holding my breath...)
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I don't expect that to ever happen. I expect people to always have prejudices, and to have those prejudices influence their actions.
What laws can address is
institutionalized prejudice--where individual biases have become so common, and so strong, that people who don't have the prejudice, still follow the bias because they've come to consider it "normal." For example, the idea that women should wear makeup in public. Or the idea that a group of black teens is more likely to be criminal than a group of white teens, and should be watched more carefully by police.
The people who follow and reinforce these biases may not think that natural-looking women are wrong or unappealing, nor that black people are inherently more greedy, violent or stupid than white people. They may just think that "it's normal for women to wear makeup" or "there's certainly a lot of crime in the mostly-black neighborhoods"--and so allow the prejudice of others, who do believe those things, to influence their actions.
And as mentioned, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is the tendency to hire "people like me;" without any prejudice at all, an employer, or a university department, will chose people similar to itself, because there's a resonance that doesn't exist in other cases. What they think of as "similar to me" is based strongly on society's ideas of groups of people... in some cases, it splits along racial lines, in others, gender lines, in others, by religion or class or education level.