Portal:Discrimination
Discrimination
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Discrimination within sociology is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. Examples of categories on which discrimination is seen include race and ethnicity, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, weight, disability, employment circumstances, and age. |
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Antiziganism is hostility, prejudice or racism directed at the Romani people, commonly called Gypsies. The Roma — who have often been stereotyped as thieves, tramps, con men and fortune tellers — have been subject to various forms of discrimination throughout history.
Due in part to their semi-nomadic and isolationist lifestyle, and differences in language and culture, there has been a great deal of mutual distrust between the Roma and the more settled indigenous inhabitants of the areas to which the Roma migrated. This distrust has persisted even though Roma who migrated into Europe often converted to Christianity, and those who arrived in the Middle East became Muslims.
Persecution of Roma reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos, the Nazi genocide of Roma during the Holocaust. Because the Romani communities of Eastern Europe were less organized than the Jewish communities, it is more difficult to assess the actual number of victims though the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute in Washington puts the number of Romani lives lost by 1945 at between a half and one and a half million. The ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill has argued that the Roma population suffered proportionally more genocide than the Jewish population of Europe.
Antizigan discrimination has continued in the 2000s, particularly in the Balkans, in areas such as Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia. Roma tend to live in low-class ghettos, are subject to discrimination in jobs and schools, and are often subject to police brutality. In spite of long waiting time for a child adoption, Romani children from orphanages are almost never adopted by Czech couples.
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The Holocaust was a campaign of genocide by the Adolf Hitler-led Nazi German government before and during World War II. The primary targets of the effort were Jews, although Poles, Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals were also targeted.
This image shows piles of exterminated bodies in a Nazi concentration camp found after the camp was liberated by Allied forces.
Did you know?
- ...that affirmative action is unlawful in the United Kingdom (where segregation never was actually legal, although practiced)?
- ...that representatives of the American Nazi Party were (deliberately) invited to a Nation of Islam rally in 1962?
- ...that anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy also targeted homosexuals in government, in what has been nicknamed the Lavender Scare?
- ...that disability-rights activist Ed Roberts sued the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation in 1961, then was appointed as its director in 1975?
- ...that in some African and Asian nations, homosexuality is legally punishable by death?
- ...that some Louisiana parishes enacted sex segregation in schools in reaction to racial integration, in order to avoid miscegenation?
- ...that Dalits were commonly segregated from full participation in social life until the 20th century?
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