When you make a choice between people or things, you discriminate. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.us:
When we hear the word “discrimination” we often associate it with the concept of racial prejudice, the act of hate based purely on skin color or ethnicity. Multiple generations of westerners have been conditioned over the years to treat discrimination as an anathema to civilization – A net negative. But is all discrimination “unjust,” or is it sometimes necessary to keep civilization safe and intact?
Every person on Earth discriminates in one way or another because it’s a survival imperative, but let me clarify what I mean when I use the term. I argue that discrimination is simply the act of refusing to associate with another person or group, and this is often NOT based merely on skin color or differences in appearance. In reality, most discrimination is rooted in personal safety and cultural security.
Human beings are tribal, there’s no way around this biological imperative and it will never change. Tribalism is based on physical safety, but also ideological safety. Human beings form tribes and kingdoms and nations and borders because they have a particular set of values, religious beliefs and cultural norms that they want to maintain and protect. They have found a system that works for them and that keeps their society from imploding, and they want to ensure that there is no sabotage of that system from within.
Hence, the need for suspicion and discrimination when a tribe is faced with outsiders that champion a hostile or contrary ideal. The threat of being subsumed and destroyed by another tribe’s culture has been a motivator for discrimination since human history began.
Yet another example of the weaponisation and politicisation of language. Words should be kept to their original neutrality of meaning.
1620s, “distinguish from something else or from each other, observe or mark the differences between,” from Latin discriminatus, past participle of discriminare “to divide, separate,” from discrimen (genitive discriminis) “interval, distinction, difference,” derived noun from discernere “to separate, set apart, divide, distribute; distinguish, perceive,” from dis- “off, away” (see dis-) + cernere “distinguish, separate, sift” (from PIE root *krei- “to sieve,” thus “discriminate, distinguish”).