When people face racial discrimination, where do they place the blame? Do they think that laws and policies are behind it? Do they blame individuals for harboring their own prejudices?
Those are questions that were posed by a recent study. It started off by asking African-American individuals if they felt like they were ever discriminated against in modern America. If they said that they did feel that way, they were then asked where they placed the blame.
Roughly 25 percent said that they saw “discrimination based in laws and government policies.” The biggest percentage by a long shot, though, went to “discrimination based on the prejudice of individual people” with about 49 percent. The other 25 percent claimed that they blamed both policies and people equally.
The study did not report the number of people who said they didn’t know or that they refused to answer, perhaps accounting for that missing 1 percent.
What this does show, however, is that people who face discrimination more often blame people, rather than laws. This suggests that those people may be willing to break fair laws in order to cater to their personal prejudice.
For instance, there are employment laws saying that people cannot face discrimination based on race, age, gender, religion and other such factors. The law itself is fair, but people still do face these types of discrimination in the modern workplace, showing that just having a law is not enough to protect everyone in every group.
As such, if you do face workplace discrimination, your co-workers or your employer could be breaking the law, and you need to know all of the legal options you have.
