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Comment by anvarik | Hacker News Reader

Why the heck shouldn't I classify this as discrimination? He tried Hans, an Italian female name, and his own, I believe is Karim. And he gets less replies than any other.

He probably wrote a pretty darn good e-mail saying how educated and well-behaved he is, bla bla from Paris have degrees etc, but guess what, no replies. Just because of his name! That is what I call discrimination, and in Germany it is pretty common.

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What if the tenants have had more bad experiences with male arab tenants and more good experiences with female italians? Could it be called "science" instead of "discrimination"?

We are not talking about a single tenant here, OP had enough data to mine, we are talking about whole munich.

Are you telling me that whole munich had arab tenants at least once in their past?

No, because they did not look at him as an individual after categorizing him. This is exactly discrimination.

For example, why would anyone expect the same behaviour from a single black criminal drug-addict as from a married black lawyer with kids? The fact that they share the same skin-tone is the least important hint to their potential behaviour, and yet, historically, it's what people use because it's the first thing they see.

Maybe "discrimination" is other name for "bad decision when good information about the other part is lacking".

Maybe, if you're unable to own up to calling your discrimination "discrimination."

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