What Is Social Justice And What Does Injustice Looks Like

By Sarah Ward


The world's population seems to be more divided than before between great wealth and abject poverty. The chances of getting ahead if you come from an impoverished background are becoming fewer and fewer. It seems that wealth, privilege, and opportunity are open to only a select group. The opposite of this scenario is social justice. This is the idea that access to the possibility of wealth, opportunity, and privilege should be open to every human being.

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 issues that plague the dream of a just society can be broken down into two basic parts. The first is the way society treats certain individuals based solely on personal prejudice, bias, misinformation, and fear. This is where unequal treatment of individuals based on their gender, race, ethnicity, age, religion, education, social status, and physical and mental disabilities, comes in to the picture.

Governments that enact unjust laws and regulations are the other part. When governments, deliberately or not, create certain conditions that have the effect of denying or limiting part of the population from accessing the same opportunities given to other parts of the population they are promoting injustice. Labor laws limiting workers' rights is one example. Another is gerrymandering and requiring voters to product certain identifying documentation in order to vote.

It can also include environmental laws that favor industrial conglomerates by not restricting how they pollute the air a community breaths or the water it drinks. In the United States, some schools are still segregated by race. In some regions of America, people of a certain race or nationality are more likely to be stopped and harassed by law enforcement.

Experts break down the ways in which society treats certain individuals unequally into direct and indirect. Direct inequality comes about when people deny certain rights and opportunities to some and not to others. If the owner of a public restaurant bars diners from eating at his establishment based on their sexual orientation, that is direct inequality. Segregated schools and public facilities that deny access to certain individuals with the consent of the government is another example.

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.




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