acceptable prejudice

July 28th, 2007 by mas | Filed under Society & Issues.

following on from a discussion the other day about how everyone makes judgements all the time about people and whether or not we’re aware of our own prejudices got me thinking about how some prejudices are accepted and some are not. So heres my ranking system for ism’s!

Racism
Sexism
Ageism

So all of the above are generally accepted as not being acceptable. What about the following - how acceptable are they?!

Hairism - being ginger or being blonde etc.
carism - what car do you drive?
accentism - what do you sound like (apparently none trusts scousers!)
postcodeism - where do you live?
educationism - where did you go to school/college/uni & what did you study?
weightism - how much do you weigh or how big are you?
heightism - people that are ‘lanky’ & people that are short
stylism - what clothes/shoes etc. do you wear?
musicism - what music do you listen to (& does it effect how you dress?)
friendism - who do you hang around with?
employmentism - what job do you have/how big is your salary?
smellism - do you smell? what deodorant/perfume do you use?

Even though the first three are regarded as unacceptable they do still of course feature in the judgments people make about others. A term that gets thrown around a lot is to be ‘non judgmental’ but is this really possible? To be a good judge of character is regarded as a positive quality. People are judged all the time - in interviews, in tests, when performing work related tasks or interpreting art or performing sports. Our children will come to judge us as parents much as parents continually judge their children and by that measure judge themselves as parents.

So maybe the term non judgmental is nonsense? Surely the real issue is unfairly discriminating on the basis of poor judgments - to be able to understand this don’t people need to be encouraged to make judgments so that they can learn from experience how often they are wrong?!