Who is the Most Discriminated Group in America?

by Michael Jones · 2009-09-15 10:29:00 UTC
Topics:

Discrimination

It's 2009, we have an African-American President, the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, six states have recognized marriage equality, and a female Speaker of the House. That's a pretty impressive line-up, but as the Pew Forum finds, these are the best of times and the worst of times for discrimination.

To be sure, great strides have been made by many groups in the United States. But when it comes to the issue of who are the most discriminated groups in America in 2009, the survey says: LGBT people and Muslims.

LGBT people, according to the Pew Forum, face the most amount of discrimination in the United States. Their numbers show that 64 percent of the public at large think that gays and lesbians receive heavy doses of discrimination on a day-to-day basis. Muslims come in a close second at 58 percent.

Arsalan Iftikhar at trueslant.com writes that these numbers reflect a change in how society reflects on race and civil rights.

"We can find that both, one, American Muslims and, two, the American LGBT community now currently represent two of the lower societal ‘rungs’ of our current civil rights ‘discrimination totem pole’ today," writes Iftikhar.

Does that gel with where we are as a country nowadays; that LGBT people and Muslims face the brunt of discrimination?

Regardless, surveys like these always reaffirm that more work needs to be done to truly make this a post-racial, post-sexual orientation, post-gender society.

(Photo courtesy of CarbonNYC's photostream on Flickr.)

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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