There Is No Discrimination in America

The title is obviously an exaggeration. There is discrimination in America. There is racism, there are people who hate immigrants, there are people who judge Muslims, Indians, Black people, Asians, Mexicans, Jews and practically every other group you can think of. There are racist attacks, discriminatory hiring practices and people who will dislike someone purely because of the colour of their skin. I'm not denying any of that. In fact, surveys make it pretty difficult to deny: 79% of Black American adults surveyed by Pew said they had experienced racial discrimination at least from time to time, while 58% of Asian American adults said the same.

What I question is the way America is portrayed as this exceptionally discriminatory society, particularly when I compare what I see in American culture with what I have seen growing up in India. I have never been to the United States, so everything I know about everyday American life comes through American friends, movies, television, books, statistics, documentaries, news and, of course, the internet. Maybe actually living there would completely change my opinion. But from the outside, I sometimes find it strange when America is treated as the world's great example of discrimination, because Indians have managed to invent far more categories to discriminate against each other with.

In America, the conversation is overwhelmingly about race. In India, race isn't even necessary. We can look almost identical and still find ten reasons to hate each other. There is caste, religion, language, state, region, class and gender. A North Indian can discriminate against a South Indian. A South Indian can stereotype a North Indian. People from Bihar are stereotyped and insulted in other parts of the country. People from Northeast India have been mocked for their appearance and called racial slurs such as "chinki" or reduced to stereotypes about "momos." Within individual states, people discriminate based on districts, communities and languages. Then there is caste, where two people can be the same race, nationality and religion and still be told that one is somehow socially above the other. We are extraordinarily creative when it comes to finding differences between people.

Religion gives us another layer. Hindus discriminate against Muslims, Muslims can discriminate against Hindus, and both communities contain further divisions within themselves. Christians, Sikhs and other minorities can face their own forms of prejudice. Caste can continue to matter even after religion enters the picture. Marriage makes all of this particularly visible. Someone can be a perfectly decent, educated and successful person, but suddenly the family wants to know their caste, religion, mother tongue, state and community before deciding whether they're acceptable. Imagine explaining this system to an alien. "These two humans are genetically almost indistinguishable, grew up twenty kilometres apart, speak the same language and work in the same office, but their grandparents belonged to different social groups, therefore marriage is unacceptable." The alien would probably assume we were joking.

Gender discrimination can be even more disturbing because the person being discriminated against can literally be your own child. Go far enough into places where traditional attitudes remain strong and you can still encounter families where the reaction to the birth of a daughter is disappointment while the birth of a son is celebrated. Of course this is not every Indian family, and attitudes have changed enormously, but son preference has been a serious enough phenomenon in India that it cannot simply be dismissed as a stereotype. A child hasn't done anything yet. She hasn't developed a personality, chosen a career, committed a crime or made a single meaningful decision, and somehow being born female can already change how people perceive her future.

That is partly why American discrimination looks different to me. It certainly exists, but America also talks about it constantly. When someone makes an openly racist comment, there is a reasonable chance that other Americans will call it racist. There are studies about racial discrimination, protests about racial discrimination, political campaigns about racial discrimination, corporate policies about racial discrimination and endless arguments about racial discrimination. Asian Americans, for example, report being treated as perpetual foreigners even when they were born in America, and Pew found that 58% of Asian American adults said they had experienced racial discrimination or unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity. That's not evidence that discrimination doesn't exist. It does. But the fact that a society constantly discusses a problem can make the problem more visible than in societies where the same behaviour is simply accepted as normal.

This is important because silence should not be confused with tolerance. Imagine one society where people constantly argue about racism, publish statistics about it, protest against it and publicly shame racist behaviour. Now imagine another society where nobody talks about caste discrimination because everyone quietly accepts that certain castes shouldn't marry each other. If you measured discrimination simply by counting how often the subject appears in the media, the first society might look worse. In reality, the second society might simply have normalized its prejudice so thoroughly that nobody thinks it is worth discussing.

There is also something else about prejudice that I think gets lost in these discussions. Many stereotypes begin with someone observing a real or perceived pattern and then completely misunderstanding what that pattern means. Consider the stereotype connecting Black Americans with crime. Someone repeatedly sees Black suspects in American crime coverage, sees statistics showing disparities in certain crimes, watches videos of robberies online and eventually starts associating Black skin with criminality. The problem is that even if a statistical difference exists between populations, it doesn't follow that skin colour caused it. Melanin doesn't make someone rob a store. It doesn't make someone violent. Skin pigmentation is not a personality trait.

The interesting question isn't "Why do Black people commit crime?" It is why particular communities experience different crime rates in the first place. Poverty, neighbourhood conditions, education, family circumstances, exposure to violence, policing, employment opportunities, peer groups, historical wealth and social mobility are all far more plausible places to investigate than pigmentation. If you take a Black child and raise him in a wealthy, safe household with excellent schools, stable parents and access to opportunities, and take a white child and raise him in an environment filled with poverty, violence, unstable institutions and terrible schools, the amount of melanin in their skin tells you very little about how their lives will turn out. Race can correlate with social conditions because of history, but correlation isn't a magical biological explanation for behaviour.

The same mistake can now be seen in some of the prejudice Indians experience online. India has genuine problems with sanitation, pollution, overcrowding and waste management. There are plenty of horrifying videos online of filthy streets, polluted rivers or unhygienic food preparation. Someone in America or Europe who has never visited India might see hundreds of those videos. Eventually their brain starts creating an association: India is dirty, therefore Indians are dirty. But those are completely different statements. A sanitation problem in an Indian city says absolutely nothing about the hygiene of the Indian software engineer sitting next to you in California. You have taken an observation about infrastructure in one place and transformed it into a personality characteristic of 1.4 billion individuals.

This happens to Muslims as well. Someone repeatedly sees Islamic terrorist organizations in the news. Their brain gradually compresses "Islamist extremist" into "Muslim," even though the overwhelming majority of the world's roughly two billion Muslims will never participate in terrorism. The same psychological shortcut appears when an immigrant commits a horrific crime and people begin talking as though millions of unrelated immigrants share responsibility. One person becomes representative of a group only when it confirms something we already want to believe.

Interestingly, stereotypes don't even have to be negative to be discriminatory. Asians are good at mathematics. Indians are good at software. Chinese people work extremely hard. Jews are good with money. These can sound like compliments, but they still make the same mistake. They replace an individual with an imagined average of their group. An Asian child who hates mathematics doesn't magically become good at calculus because of his ancestry. An Indian doesn't spawn into the world knowing JavaScript. Pew's research on Asian Americans even discusses the "model minority" stereotype, including assumptions that Asians are naturally successful, hardworking or good at mathematics and science.

The deeper problem, then, isn't simply racism. It is the way humans think. Our brains are pattern-recognition machines. Pattern recognition is one of our greatest abilities. If five encounters with a particular animal nearly kill your ancestors, being suspicious of the sixth animal is probably a useful evolutionary adaptation. But modern societies contain millions of people interacting through institutions, economies and cultures. The mental shortcut that helped us survive can become incredibly misleading when we use it to judge individuals.

This is also why I think many forms of prejudice are more solvable than they appear. If inequality were literally caused by melanin, there wouldn't be much society could do about it. But if the underlying causes are education, poverty, neighbourhood conditions, historical exclusion, incentives, institutions and opportunity, then those things can change. Schools can improve. Dangerous neighbourhoods can become safer. People can gain access to employment. Families can accumulate wealth over generations. Discriminatory laws can disappear. Social attitudes can change. Integration can happen. None of this is easy, and historical disadvantages can persist for generations, but these are human systems rather than biological destiny.

America itself is a fascinating example of that process. Groups that were once regarded with suspicion can gradually become completely ordinary parts of American society. Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, Arab and countless other communities have all contributed to what America now considers American. That integration has frequently involved ugly periods of exclusion and discrimination, and it would be ridiculous to pretend everyone is treated identically today. Asian Americans, for instance, still report frequently being treated as foreigners regardless of how long their families have been in the country. Yet the idea that someone can arrive from India, become an American citizen and eventually have children who simply think of themselves as American is incredibly powerful.

India has this capacity too, but our identities are often stacked differently. You aren't simply Indian. You are Indian, then perhaps Kannadiga, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali, Bihari or Malayali. Then Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh or something else. Then your caste or community. Then your language. Then perhaps your district or hometown. None of those identities are inherently bad. Cultural identities make the world interesting. The problem begins when an identity stops describing me and starts determining what I think about you.

That is why I don't think the solution is pretending differences don't exist. Groups really can have different average outcomes. Different cultures really do produce different behaviours. Different countries have different problems. Some communities really are poorer than others. Some regions really do have worse sanitation. Some populations really do perform differently in education. We should be able to study those differences without immediately becoming racist, casteist or xenophobic. In fact, refusing to study differences can make solving them harder.

The important distinction is between analysing a population and judging an individual. If crime is unusually high somewhere, study it. Ask why. If girls are dropping out of school in a particular region, study it. If one caste remains disproportionately poor, study it. If an immigrant community is struggling to integrate, study it. If Indians are overrepresented in some profession, study it. Statistics are useful for understanding populations and designing policy. They become dangerous when you look at one person and decide you already know who they are because you know the group they belong to.

So yes, the title of this essay is wrong. There is discrimination in America. Black Americans experience it. Asian Americans experience it. Indians experience it. Muslims experience it. Immigrants experience it. Plenty of Americans have undoubtedly experienced discrimination that I will never understand from watching the country through a screen. The point isn't that America has solved discrimination.

The point is that America isn't uniquely discriminatory. Humans are discriminatory.

Take race away and we'll divide ourselves by religion. Take religion away and we'll find caste. Remove caste and we'll use nationality. Remove nationality and we'll use language. Remove language and we'll use class. Remove class and we'll probably find another difference nobody has thought of yet. India demonstrates this perfectly because people who look almost identical can still construct elaborate social boundaries between themselves.

Perhaps the more useful goal isn't to create a world where nobody notices groups. That seems unrealistic. Instead, we should understand when group-level thinking is useful and when it becomes stupid. Use groups to understand sociology, economics, history and public policy. Use statistics to identify problems. Use patterns to ask better questions about society.

But when an actual person is standing in front of you, start again.

The Black man in front of you isn't a crime statistic. The Indian isn't a viral street-food video. The Muslim isn't a terrorist organization. The Bihari isn't a regional stereotype. The woman isn't a disappointed grandmother's preference for a son. The Asian kid isn't automatically a mathematician.

They're just people.

And you can wait until they actually do something before deciding what you think of them.