Analogies: Is the Game Fair?

Imagine you have a kid - maybe you really do so this will be easy. Your kid loves basketball. She practices every day and is the star of her traveling team. They have a huge tournament over several weekends, and she is super excited and hopes to help her team win the whole thing.

But in the first game you notice that she's getting called for fouls a lot. Fouls she isn't committing. And the other kids are not getting called when they foul her. It's unfair officiating and she has a bad game. Afterwards you console her and agree that it wasn't fair. But she should shake it off. Keep working hard and doing her best and everything will work out. But the same thing happens in the next game: the refs single her out, treat her unfairly, and she doesn't do as well as she's capable of.

So you look into it and hear the refs are doing this to some other kids too. All kids with blue eyes like your daughter. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for it, but the stats prove it's true. Blue-eyed kids are being called for more fouls, fewer fouls are being called against them, and all the statistics show that blue-eyed kids are not performing as well as other kids or as well as they have done throughout their career. The whole tournament is unfair to kids like yours. What do you do?

First, you probably repeat your inspirational speech to your kid. Life isn't always fair but you do the best you can in the circumstances you find yourself in. You just have to play harder and be better than the other kids. Try to keep yourself out of situations where they might call a foul on you. Don't let the fouls other commits get to you. Let it go and focus on your own actions and if you don't win realize it isn't your fault. You know you tried your best.

Good parenting, but is that all? I don't think you'd just accept an unfair tournament. You'd probably complain to the rules committee. Maybe organize the other parents. Carry signs. Yell at the refs. Maybe go so far as to boycott a game. And if you did everything you could and the tournament was still biased against your kid I bet you'd definitely skip that tournament in the future. You would do everything you could to ensure your kid gets treated fairly, that they have an equal chance to win as every other kid out there. They deserve it.

Now, what if your kid had brown eyes and they weren't the ones being discriminated against? What if instead of a basketball tournament it was life itself? What would you do to make sure it was fair? We all know the right thing to do, we just have to be motivated out of self-interest to do it. We should be better than that. All kids deserve it.