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Shashank Pasya
Profs. Thiede and Boisvert
LBST 2213-Q20
20 Oct. 2015
Discrimination
Originating from Latin, both discrimination and discriminate share the same roots in the
word discrminre which meant to divide, separate, to distinguish, [and] differentiate
(Discrimination, OED). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest record of
discriminations usage was in William Loes English translation of Vox Clamantis. A poem of
10,000 lines that was originally written by John Gower, vox Clamantis focused on the corruption
and evil in society with regards to the Peasants Revolt of 1381 in England. In the Vox Clamantis,
Gower likes to identify himself with John the Baptist. He says that judgement needs to be
reserved until the Last Judgement by God and he will not take it upon himself to differentiate
because that is representative of judgement.
Discrimination is the action of finding a distinction between things. The distinctions one
makes can range from simple things such as male or female to complex things such as the
different types of species that live on Earth. Speaking of complex, have you ever enjoyed a good
wine? Wine connoisseurs are masters of discrimination; a wine connoisseur is someone whose
job is to taste various types of wines and critique the wines. Not only do they have to tell whether
it tastes good or not, they also have to be able to go into immense detail about the texture, color,
smell, bottling, labeling, origin, and age of the wine. These are the materialistic things you can
discriminate as opposed to the abstract concept of good versus evil which is what the Clamantis
dealt with.
Over the past century, the word discrimination has taken a much different connotation
than what a dictionary definition might indicate. While the word originally started out as a way
to describe differentiation, the historical context of slavery has changed it very much.

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Works Cited
Discrimination. Oxford English Dictionary. Online. (library subscription access)

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Shashank Pasya
Profs. Thiede and Boisvert
LBST 2213-Q20
3 Nov. 2015
The Social Reality
From its origins to when it actually gained prominence to the present day, the weight that
the word discrimination carries with it has changed drastically.
Slavery in America dates back as early as 1619 when approximately 20 captive Africans
[were] sold in Jamestown, Virginia ("Slavery and the Making of America"). Slaves were usually
treated as property and much more harshly whites. The discrimination that the slaves faced due
to the color of their skin forced them to live as if they were something less than human and
increased racism. Slaves were given very little freedom; he or she would work from dawn to
dusk, be given a minimal amount of food if any, live in shacks, and be subjected to physical
punishment such as lashes ("Slave Life and Slave Codes"). After the Civil War, blacks thought
they would be treated equally with whites but that was not the case. While blacks were able to
gain independence, they werent allowed to mingle with whites nor welcomed inside restaurants,
barbershops, etc. Eventually, rules for segregation called Jim Crow laws were created under the
notion of separate but equal meaning separate establishments meant for blacks and even
separate housing facilities in states such as Louisiana or else the owner of the property would be
fined ("Examples of Jim Crow Laws"). The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first large-scale
demonstration against segregation occurred when a Jim Crow law was broken by Rosa Parks,
an African American woman, who wouldnt give up her seat for a white person and got arrested
("Montgomery Bus Boycot."). Thanks to the civil rights movement, blacks could finally label
their treatment as discrimination with a negative connotation that suggested it was more than
just a differentiation between two things and associated discrimination with the suffering of the
blacks.
From 1933 to 1945, the word discrimination could only conjure one image to people
around the world: Nazi Germany. The rise of Adolf Hitler to power brought not prosperity but
inhumanity. Convinced that the key to Germanys success was a purification of the German race,
he set an agenda to exterminate those he deemed impure and persecuted one group just because
of their religion: Jews. Although there [was] evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the
Holocaust, it was Hitlers regime that claimed a need for a Final Solution; Jews and others
were taken as prisoners to concentration camps such as Auschwitz and brutally murdered in gas
chambers ("The Holocaust"). These crimes were so heinous that when the word discrimination
is applied to describe the event the weight of the word increases dramatically due to the tragedy
and sorrow of the context.
Though we have come a long way in the past few decades in tolerating people of other
races, skin color, and religion, discrimination has found a new target in todays society: the
LGBT community. LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and the first three are
people who identify themselves as those with a sexual orientation that deviates from the norm
and transgender is a term used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex the
doctor marked on their birth certificate ("Transgender FAQ"). The LGBT community has been
discriminated against because of various reasons such as people thinking its not normal to the
Bible does not allow gayness. While they are not persecuted to the extent that Jews were
persecuted during the Holocaust, the LGBT community still faces many acts of bigotry. In March
of 2015, a same-sex couple from Los Angeles went to Honolulu for vacation and were arrested

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for kissing inside a grocery store by a police officer who was off duty. Courtney Wilson and
Taylor Guerrero were also attacked by the police officer and eventually released from jail but
were stuck in Honolulu for several months until they could pay for their ride back home (Sidner).
From the mid-1900s there was a significant change in the social context that surrounded
the word discrimination.

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Works Cited
"Examples of Jim Crow Laws." Ferris.edu. The Jackson Sun News, n.d. Web. 03 Nov. 2015.
<http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/links/misclink/examples/homepage.htm>.
History.com Staff. "The Holocaust." History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2009. Web. 03
Nov. 2015. <http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-holocaust>.
History.com Staff. "Montgomery Bus Boycott." History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2010.
Web. 03 Nov. 2015. <http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/montgomery-bus-boycott>.
Sidner, Sara. "Kiss on the Cheek Triggers Trouble for Same Sex Couple on Hawaiian Vacation."
CNN. Cable News Network, 31 Oct. 2015. Web. 03 Nov. 2015.
<http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/us/hawaii-kissing-couple-arrest-same-sex/>.
"Slave Life and Slave Codes." Ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, n.d. Web. 03 Nov.
2015. <http://www.ushistory.org/us/27b.asp>.
"Slavery and the Making of America." Pbs.com. PBS, n.d. Web. 03 Nov. 2015.
<http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/1619.html>.
"Transgender FAQ." Glaad.org. GLAAD, 08 Nov. 2013. Web. 03 Nov. 2015.
<http://www.glaad.org/transgender/transfaq>.

Shashank Pasya

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Profs. Thiede and Boisvert
LBST 2213-Q20
20 Oct. 2015
Part Three
Discrimination is bad. Discrimination is wrong. Discrimination is illegal.
When I was exactly five years old, my family moved from India to a place called
America. This strange new land was just as scary as it was enticing. All the buildings were huge,
clean, and shiny. Everywhere I went there were huge roads, fast cars, and fresh clean air but
there was also something else: new people. I had to learn to not only adjust to new surroundings,
but also new kinds of people I had never before seen in my life. Americans looked nothing like
any person I had seen up to that point as everyone was either white or black and I would soon
learn that there was a long history behind these two types of people.
Soon after enrolling in school, I started to learn bits and pieces of American history but in
the end they all stressed about slavery and segregation. There was one key word that related back
to these two things: discrimination. My teachers did not get into the specifics by teaching us
the dictionary definition of the word and the difference between discrimination and prejudice
since we were too young to understand the subtle differences. They did however teach us to
associate the concepts slavery, segregation, discrimination, prejudice, and racism with bad and
wrong. That was my first encounter with discrimination and I quickly learned to think of
anything to do with it as bad and undesirable and came to the realization that if discrimination
was as bad as it was during the mid-1900s I would not have had the privilege of attending a
magnet school alongside both whites and blacks. Even as I grew older, I started to come to the
realization that discrimination still existed, only in different forms than what I learned from in
textbooks. After 9/11, there were many stories of discrimination against Muslims either from
fear or just pure hatred. In middle school, I was exposed to a much wider range of knowledge
including the existence of people with different sexualities such as lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and
transgender. I learned that they too became the subject of hate crimes and were often
discriminated to the point where they committed suicide. Even after gaining this knowledge, my
understanding of the word discrimination remained limited to something I learned in
elementary school, which is an act committed against someone out of prejudice.
When I started my research on discrimination, OED defined the word as to divide,
separate, to distinguish, [and] differentiate. To say I was puzzled would have been an
understatement since for as long as I could remember, I associated that word with racism,
segregation, etc. That moment that I saw the definition, my perspective changed not only on the
word itself but also the society that we live in because the way that word was defined any person
not familiar with the English language could easily think it was a mere synonym for differentiate.
I had the epiphany that there was nothing wrong with the word but that we live in a fickle
society. This society is so fickle that it was able to create such a negative connotation for the

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word based on the social factors that I thought of the words definition as it was influenced by
these social factors and could not see it for what it actually was. Ironically, I ended up
discriminating against the word without knowing it and felt guilty that I wanted to start using
the word in less negative context.

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Works Cited
Discrimination. Oxford English Dictionary. Online. (library subscription access)