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How Much Ageism Is Justifiable?
The issue with exclusion by age is that it’s sometimes necessary
It’s illegal in the United States to discriminate on the basis of age if someone is over 40 years old. This type of protection puts this type of discrimination in league with those that protect on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, race, religion, etc. Of course, we have a name for discrimination against the elderly as well, “ageism”, making it once more comparable to other practices of bias and stereotyping, such as sexism and racism.
But most people recognize that these things are not actually very similar. For one, there’s no job that you cannot automatically be disqualified from on the basis of race or sex. This is because race and sex are basically just slight variations on the human form that different people are born with. Age, however, is a physical and mental disintegration that slowly happens to all of us over many years and eventually leads to death. They are qualitatively very different things.
We all implicitly practice ageism, often in kind ways. We make exceptions for elderly people if they demonstrate some type of bigotry, saying “They’re just old” or “They won’t change now.” We’re taught to respect our elders and to generally give way to them. It’s very unbecoming for a young person to outright argue with someone…