#MotsPourMaux: Is there more discrimination today than before?

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20 minutes

For this first issue of Mots Pour Maux, the video program that deciphers the lexicon of discrimination,

20 Minutes

has chosen to talk to you… about the word “discrimination”!

Discrimination is according to the law unfavorable treatment in a specific situation: for example at work, or in access to a service or housing.

There are 25 discrimination criteria in French law: origin, sex, morals, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, pregnancy, genetic characteristics, ethnicity, supposed "race", nation and more that you can consult here.

The number of these criteria is the subject of debate.

For some researchers, they are too numerous, and drown the discriminations considered the most important.

There are other countries where there are far fewer criteria of discrimination.

In the United States, for example, there are only six: race, sex, color, religion, origin, disability.

The invention of the concept of "discrimination"

Have we always thought in terms of “discrimination”?

No.

The first measures against discrimination appeared in France in the 1970s, with the Pleven law against racism and with the ratification of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and its article 14 on the prohibition of discriminations.

But the notion of discrimination really took hold in the public debate at the end of the 1990s, in the wake of the March for equality and against racism, in 1983, as explained by Didier Fassin, in

The invention. French discrimination

.

It was the beginning of anti-discrimination policies.

We will then create the Halde, the High Authority for the fight against discrimination and for equality.

She would later become the Defender of Rights - in this case now she is THE Defender of Rights

Is discrimination increasing?

We can ask ourselves: why has there been more attention on discrimination in recent years?

Is it because their number is increasing?

Not necessarily: Yes, the number of complaints to the Halde and to the Defender of Rights has not stopped increasing, but that does not mean that there is “more” discrimination than 30 years ago.

It is undoubtedly that part of the opinion became more sensitive on this subject.

This is shown by the tolerance index of the CNCDH, the National Consultative Commission for Human Rights, which confirms this trend towards more tolerance since the 1990s:

And this is also explained by sociologist François Dubet, in his book

Pourquoi moi?

The experience of discrimination

 : "If we talk so much about discrimination, it is not because it would be more important today than yesterday, it is because the social and normative framework in which it emerges as a scandal and a polymorphous public problem has changed dramatically.

(…) Paradoxically, discrimination becomes a social problem and a political problem when equality and freedom progress and when the segregation legitimized by culture and often by law recedes.

"

This is called the “paradox of growing dissatisfaction” or “Tocqueville's paradox”, named after the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville: the more a society becomes egalitarian, the more inequalities are perceived as intolerable.

This gives hope for a world without discrimination!

Culture

“Free!

"On Arte:" The vulva is under-represented compared to the cock ", underlines Ovidie, the creator

Television

"It's terrible never to see someone in the media who looks like you", explains Daria Marx

#WordsForMals, what is it?

White privilege, gender, sexism, validism, racialized, intersectionality, decolonial or universal feminism, agism, queer, microaggressions ... Many words have appeared in our vocabulary, more or less long ago, without our always knowing precisely the words. contours, even their definition.

Does sexism only concern women, or any distinction made on the basis of sex?

What is a “white privilege”, and does that mean that people perceived as white are necessarily privileged?

What is ageism?

And why do people who oppose the notion of race say they are “racialized”? 

With #MotsPourMaux, twice a month, 

20 Minutes

 helps you to see more clearly in these concepts. 

  • Racism

  • Words

  • Culture

  • Lgbt

  • Sexism

  • Discrimination