vendredi 22 février 2019

What Do Social Justice And Injustice Look Like

By Sarah Ward


The world's population seems to be more divided than before between great wealth and abject poverty. The chances of getting ahead if you come from an impoverished background are becoming fewer and fewer. It seems that wealth, privilege, and opportunity are open to only a select group. The opposite of this scenario is social justice. This is the idea that access to the possibility of wealth, opportunity, and privilege should be open to every human being.

This concept did not emerge on the world scene until the mid-nineteenth century. This was the time of the Industrial Revolution and of other civil rebellions occurring throughout Europe. The focus during this period was on property, capital, and the fair distribution of wealth.

In the middle of the twentieth century the idea started to expand. Gender, nationality, race, and environmental equality were included. The concept also expanded from just a governmental responsibility to create an equal society to include personal responsibility for alleviating the unjust conditions suffered by victims all over the world.

The drawbacks to establishing a truly equal society are broken down by experts into two basic parts. One is the way individuals in mainstream society treat others based only on personal bias, prejudice, fear, and misinformation. Examples of this are people who are treated unequally because of their gender, age, race, religion, social status, education, nationality, or mental and physical disabilities.

Unequal government regulations is the second part experts cite. This is when a government, knowingly or not, creates conditions that deny, limit, or make it difficult for certain segments of society to have access to opportunities given to other segments of the same society. This can be voting laws that allow redistricting and require voters to have certain forms of identification. It might be labor laws that limit the rights of workers.

It can also include environmental laws that favor industrial conglomerates by not restricting how they pollute the air a community breaths or the water it drinks. In the United States, some schools are still segregated by race. In some regions of America, people of a certain race or nationality are more likely to be stopped and harassed by law enforcement.

Experts break down the ways in which society treats certain individuals unequally into direct and indirect. Direct inequality comes about when people deny certain rights and opportunities to some and not to others. If the owner of a public restaurant bars diners from eating at his establishment based on their sexual orientation, that is direct inequality. Segregated schools and public facilities that deny access to certain individuals with the consent of the government is another example.

When the government enacts laws that do not directly inhibit the rights of individuals, but in fact do, that is indirect inequality. An example might be laws that restrict mail in voting and require specific voter identification. When you buy clothing manufactured in sweatshops, you are supporting people who victimize laborers.




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