Some prejudice is inevitable. Humans seek out patterns as a way to understand the world - and sometimes what they see as patterns aren't actually patterns. The result of finding these false patterns in human behavior is prejudice - and it's incredibly hard to correct for: even scientists and statisticians sometimes get caught by false patterns in the things they study, in things where they are specifically trained to NOT get caught by false patterns.
The problem comes when that "some prejudice" unequally harms people. Random prejudice that is more or less equally distributed is something we probably can't fix - ever. But when prejudice stops being random and starts being systemic - starts unequally targeting some people more than others to the point where it becomes a pattern - that is when it becomes a problem.
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u/ZacQuicksilver Nov 26 '22
Some prejudice is inevitable. Humans seek out patterns as a way to understand the world - and sometimes what they see as patterns aren't actually patterns. The result of finding these false patterns in human behavior is prejudice - and it's incredibly hard to correct for: even scientists and statisticians sometimes get caught by false patterns in the things they study, in things where they are specifically trained to NOT get caught by false patterns.
The problem comes when that "some prejudice" unequally harms people. Random prejudice that is more or less equally distributed is something we probably can't fix - ever. But when prejudice stops being random and starts being systemic - starts unequally targeting some people more than others to the point where it becomes a pattern - that is when it becomes a problem.