miercuri, 20 februarie 2019

What Do Social Justice And Injustice Look Like

By Sarah Ward


The world seems to be more sharply divided than ever between the haves and the have nots. Wealth, opportunity, and privilege in many parts of the world, including the United States, seems to be the prerogative of a select few. Social justice on the other hand is the concept of everyone having the same access to the possibilities of wealth, opportunities, and privileges.

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.

A hundred years later the concept began to expand. It grew to include gender, race, ethnicity, and the environment. This idea has also expanded from being the prime responsibility of governments to create an equal society into a universal concern for the condition of all victimized humans no matter where they are.

The experts break down the issues that prevent a just society into two parts. The first involves how society treats some individuals based entirely on their own personal bias, misinformation, fear, and prejudice. This is the case when people are treated unequally just because they are of a different race, religion, age, social status, ethnicity, or have mental or 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.

Laws pertaining to the environment that have loopholes allowing industrial waste to pollute rivers and lakes where communities get their drinking water and pollute the air those communities breathe is an example of injustice condoned by local, state, and federal governments. In the United States, people of specific nationalities and races are more likely to be detained by law enforcement.

In the matter of societal treatment that causes injustice, the experts break it down into the direct and indirect form. Direct inequality is the act of denying rights and opportunities to some people, but not to others. One example of direct inequality is denying individuals the right to eat in a public restaurant based solely on the sexual orientation of those individuals. Governments that segregate schools and other public facilities based on race are an example of direct inequality.

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.




About the Author:



Niciun comentariu:

Trimiteți un comentariu

Yahoo! News: Most Viewed