ABSTRACT
An assertion of equal or unequal treatment is only meaningful in discrimination discourse in conjunction with the ascription to some individual of what we will call an objective status. Familiar examples include race, ethnicity, religion, language, sex, sexual orientation, age or disability, but many others are possible. In this chapter, we will see that every objective status represents some set of elements comprised of at least two subsets. A discrimination dispute concerns the treatment of one subset as compared with another.
