There’s a long-standing affirmative action program in Canada’s North that prescribes the preferential hiring of local residents – that is, people who have lived more than half of their lives in the North, regardless of ethnicity. It’s long been a puzzle to me, as an ex-pat Southerner who still considers herself a citizen. Surely the people who grew up here are better-connected, better-acquainted with opportunities, and more likely to be hired for their relevant local knowledge. A suspicion grew that they were so well placed as to have the power to institute a law assuring their own children’s continued privilege.
Sure enough, someone is finally launching a challenge to the policy under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it’s got me thinking about discrimination. The validity of an affirmative action program rests in large part on a demonstrably disadvantaged group. While Northerners may turn out not to fit the bill as victims in their own region, there is a group of people who consistently get the worst end of every social competition, from jobs to grades to mates.
Relatives returning from Trinidad & Tobago brought back a souvenir t-shirt for my infant-at-the-time son. It read “I Only Cry When Ugly People Hold Me.” In child development labs across the world, babies are demonstrating this very phenomenon. They are sucking harder at their experimental bottles to earn a glimpse of a good-looking face. The adults around them, in turn, are preferentially treating the more attractive babies, and as they get older these lucky kids will be perceived as more intelligent and receive more praise from their teachers. The little symmetrical wonders will end up more highly educated as a result and be inspected for longer at the doctor’s office. They’ll be more confident and have a higher self-worth, culminating in a higher paying job. The winners of the genetic lottery will even get loans with better terms.
The fact that this all squares with evolutionary theory, that good looks correlate with good nutrition and health, that the prejudice pervades every sphere in which we have bothered to look for it, only serves to make us complacent and oblivious to the patent unfairness and arbitrary nature of discrimination based on looks. Lookism is natural. But so, one might argue, is violence, and there is widespread agreement about the vigilance needed to combat it in society. Perhaps equal-opportunity employers should start protecting the plainer among us.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Hi Jessa,
Caught you on Bloggingheads when you were explaining the practice of ancient Greeks rising from sleep @ night during increased release of prolactin. Found your session really interesting! Yes, Lookism, is alive and well. I have two children. Both are good-looking (they are both adopted BTW) who seem to fair exceptionally well in all aspects of their lives with very little effort. I often wonder how they would fair if they weren’t so beautiful. I admit, I also cut them a lot of slack based on their beauty and so, even I, am not immune.
i was reading an article about elephant bonding on here and the speculation is that there are evolutionary mechanisms at work to help even out the playing field between members as to ensure greater genetic diversity. This is what they said: the dominant male elephant will have access to the most resources: food, water, reproduction opportunities. At the same time, males go into a sort of heat where they become somewhat unstoppable and will gain access to superior resources.
in my opinion it is probably very difficult to be good looking because others will always put on a mask around them. you know the type: those who cling to others of beauty power ect. because good things surround those types of people and they’re there and snatch it away from the one who is brilliant, beautiful, you know…