The Discrimination Card

Wednesday morning office warfare is going along fine and dandy: three idiots are battling it out over God knows what, using all their favourite rehearsed cliché one-liners – artful vernacular swipes at exposed intellectual jugulars. And then someone from the sideline asks, “Is that person being discriminated against?” All of a sudden the conflict erodes like sandcastles into the sea. Was there really discrimination? Now it may become a battle of ‘if there ever was’, or ‘definitely wasn’t’. Enter on the stage, the show stealer, Guilt.
Confrontation on a level playing field, with a hint of honour to spice up the drab corporate fanfare, should be fought by individuals with only their wit and intelligence. But when the battle turns into a ‘you don’t respect me because I’m [insert your preferred weapon of mass discrimination]!’ spat, things have turned very nasty, and sadly, desperate.
Some play the discrimination card to upset their foe; anti-discriminatory rhetoric is so deeply embedded in Western institutions that to even think you may have inadvertently made a Freudian slip or chosen the wrong descriptor for a person – thereby exposing your inner-demon-discriminatory-self – can send the best of us into years of pious self-examination. After all, deep down, everyone has a discriminatory view on something.
The discrimination card does protect people; particularly those who feel vulnerable to discrimination. But most people who can easily be discriminated against don’t pull the discrimination card at all. To use it makes them feel cheap, and sends a message that they are dangerous to their colleagues when it comes to confrontation, and so they are unable to have an intelligent argument ever again! How drab life can be for the discriminated.
When all is said and done, there will always be discrimination and reverse-discrimination, and even though it is legally outlawed on one level, it will be played out on another, proving that the law, like people, is not perfect.