About Discrimination

Discrimination is commonly defined as any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Discrimination lies at the root of many of the world’s pressing human rights issues and no country is immune from it.
Direct discrimination is a little bit different: Direct discrimination is when a person treats, or proposes to treat, someone with a protected personal characteristic unfavourably because of that personal characteristic. Direct discrimination often happens because people make unfair assumptions about what people with certain personal characteristics can and cannot do.
People discriminate out of ignorance and Selfishness, because they don't think about how it would make other people feel to behave like that. In some cases, discrimination even makes discriminators fell better.

Changing discriminative behaviour is about providing for everyone's needs when planning care (such as wheelchair access, meals for vegetarians, information in other languages etc.). But the first thing to do to transforme discrimination into tolerance has a lot to do with the way people relate to some social problems: for example, many people discriminate peruvians in Santiago because they are said to 'take the jobs a chilean would make for more money'. In that and in many other cases, it´s about informing people the source of the problem - unemployment, in the example - is not in the discriminated people, but on a structural problem.

Here are some practical things each one of us can do.

- Help people who are treated badly because they are different.

- Tell people what it is like to have a disability.

- Make friends with people who are different.

- Try to understand people who are different.