Discrimination is an act of violence.

The Healing of Suffering by Silo

Punta de Vacas, Mendoza, Argentina, May 4, 1969

In these paragraphs from the talk, we have replaced the word "violence" with "discrimination" to reinforce the notion that discrimination is an act of violence.

There is also economic discrimination. Economic discrimination is the discrimination through which you exploit other people; economic discrimination occurs when you steal from another when you are no longer a brother or sister to others but a bird of prey feeding upon them.

There is also racial discrimination. Or do you think that you are not being violent when you persecute someone because that person is not of your own race? Do you think that you are not engaging in discrimination when you malign that person for being of a race different from your own?

And there is religious discrimination: Do you think that you are not engaging in discrimination when you refuse work to, close your doors to, or dismiss a person, because that person does not share your religious beliefs? Do you believe that it is not discrimination when you use words of hate to build walls around other people, excluding them from your society, because they do not share your religious beliefs—isolating them within their families, segregating them and their loved ones, because they do not share your religion?

There are other forms of discrimination that are imposed by the Philistine morality. You wish to impose your way of life upon another; you wish to impose your vocation upon another. But who has told you that you are an example that must be followed? Who has told you that you can impose a way of life because it pleases you? What makes your way of life a model, a pattern that you have the right to impose on others? This, then, is another form of discrimination.