Tag Archives | Discrimination

Attacks Against Emos And Goths To Be Considered Hate Crimes In United Kingdom

By JacobSloan on April 11, 2013 in News 0

In five years, Bronies will be added to the census. The Huffington Post UK writes:

A police force has become the first in the country to record attacks on goths, emos and punks as hate crimes. Abuse towards alternative subcultures will be classed in the same way as those based on race, religion, disability or sexual orientation.

The historic move was welcomed by the mother of teenager Sophie Lancaster, who was kicked to death in Bacup, Lancashire in 2007 because she was dressed like a goth. Miss Lancaster, 20, was kicked and stamped to death because she was dressed as a goth in a park in Bacup in August 2007.

A police spokesman said: “From April 2013 Greater Manchester Police also now records alternative sub-culture related hate crime.” There are no immediate plans to change the national hate crimes register, but last year Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone acknowledged that the five recognized categories of hate crime was “an incomplete list”.

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Affirmative Action For Ugly People?

By JacobSloan on September 7, 2011 in News 25

Is being hideous a disability? Severe unattractiveness may be the final frontier in regards to discrimination based on physical characteristics. In the New York Times, economist Daniel S. Hamermesh makes the case for affirmative action for the ugly:

The effects are not small: one study showed that an American worker who was among the bottom one-seventh in looks, as assessed by randomly chosen observers, earned 10 to 15 percent less per year than a similar worker whose looks were assessed in the top one-third — a lifetime difference, in a typical case, of about $230,000.

In addition to whatever personal pleasure it gives you, being attractive also helps you earn more money, find a higher-earning spouse (and one who looks better, too!) and get better deals on mortgages. Each of these facts has been demonstrated over the past 20 years by many economists and other researchers.

Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life?

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North Carolina To Compensate Thousands Of Forced-Sterilization Victims

By JacobSloan on July 5, 2011 in News 17

The North Carolina Eugenics Board was created in 1933 and operated for decades with little public scrutiny. It used rudimentary IQ tests and gossip from neighbors to justify sterilization of young girls from poor families.

Many people don’t realize that portions of the U.S. South had eugenics programs that operated through the 1970s. NPR reports on some horrifying fairly-recent history:

Barely 40 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a single mother on welfare, or a patient in a mental hospital in North Carolina, to be sterilized against her will.

But North Carolina wasn’t alone: More than half of states in the U.S. had eugenics laws, some of which persisted into the 1970s.

North Carolina is now considering compensating its sterilization victims. A state panel heard from some of them Wednesday. They were mostly poor and uneducated — both black and white — and often just girls when it happened.

Elaine Riddick says she was sterilized at the age of 14.

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Wal-Mart Rolls Back Discrimination Law Suit

By Pelliciari on June 21, 2011 in News 8

Photo: Joey Caputo (CC)

Is Wal-Mart too big to sue? How will this and previous law suits against Wal-Mart effect the future of how other businesses deal with discrimination? Via MSNBC:

If you’re part of a group of employees working for a major U.S. corporation with a gripe about unfair treatment, your collective voices were potentially muffled Monday.

A key attempt to tackle inequality in the U.S. workforce suffered a major blow when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Wal-Mart — with its thousands of stores and millions of employment decisions — was too massive for a group of employees to sue for discrimination using class-action status.

Wal-Mart, according to a 5-4 decision by the high court, is just too big to sue. The court’s decision is a direct hit to women seeking parity in particular. Women now make up about half the U.S. workforce and that means no other minority group seeking a class action would likely constitute such a big block of employees at any one employer.

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