The Multiple Meanings of Discrimination

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Discrimination is one of the most important concepts for understanding, analyzing, and addressing social inequality. It is a term with many meanings, however, and existing research tells us little about how people understand and use the term. This study analyzes data from interviews with 38 English-speaking adults in the southeastern United States to examine how people use and make sense of the term discrimination. In structured interviews, participants described their experiences of mistreatment, reflected on whether their experiences were instances of discrimination, and explained their reasoning. Many participants expressed uncertainty about the meaning of discrimination and were unsure if it applied to particular situations. When asked to explain why they thought particular situations were or were not instances of discrimination, some participants relied on a legalistic framework, drawing from knowledge they had gained in their formal educational and training. Others foregrounded issues of inequality and social justice, explicitly invoking racism, sexism, and social class when explaining why something was or was not discrimination. A third group of participants, disproportionately but not exclusively White and non-Latinx, considered discrimination to be synonymous with “differential treatment” and unrelated to social inequality. Analyses suggest that these interpretive frameworks reflect participants’ legal consciousness, political consciousness, and their ability to read particular situations as connected to specific systems of inequality—that is, their literacies of particular inequalities.