“Open Up, Reach Out” was the slogan for this year’s Zero Discrimination Day. The United Nations held its second annual celebration of the day earlier this month after UNAIDS launched its Zero Discrimination campaign on World AIDS Day in December 2013. The event, engineered by UNAIDS, celebrates diversity and rejects intolerance in all its forms.

Discrimination remains widespread in our world and is something each person can help eliminate. The support and community surrounding Zero Discrimination Day created a global movement of solidarity to end prejudice. The organization’s campaign encouraged people to use social media to say what zero discrimination means to them. People also created songs, poems and activities, and called for greater efforts from their governments to protect human rights and end inequality.

Zero Discrimination Day led me to ask a broader question: What are we, as a society, doing to help end discrimination?

Oftentimes, the answer lies in mass communication to get the word out to the public. We have made strides to incorporate anti-discrimination into many worldwide events. For example, FIFA’s slogan for the World Cup, held this past summer, was “Say No to Racism,” and teams were held accountable for demonstrating this motto throughout the tournament. The Olympic committee took another positive step during the 2014 Winter Olympics when it added nondiscrimination language regarding sexual orientation to the Olympic Charter after the host country, Russia, was criticized for not supporting LGBT rights.

And then there are all of the campaigns that gain traction through news and social media. In the past year alone, there have been numerous cries for ending intolerance, notably the campaigns “Black Lives Matter” and “Trans Lives Matter.” Thousands of people feel the pain and oppression of discrimination, and there are a wide variety of movements calling for participation, education and elimination.

With all of these different movements, it can be difficult to decipher which ones to support and to determine what we think about each. But when it all boils down, aren’t they all asking for acceptance without judgment?

So what then are we, as individuals, really doing to help? At times, it appears people are not doing much. Yet there are plenty of present-day examples that show a resistance to end discrimination.

One such case was a recent scandal that occurred when members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter at the University of Oklahoma were seen on video reciting a racist chant. In an MSNBC news segment, several employees at various universities joined Melissa Harris-Perry and discussed how the racist chant by the fraternity is only part of the story.

What was interesting was that they attributed the actions not only to the group of individuals but also to the institution as a whole. They questioned what universities and society as a whole are doing to stop the perpetuation of racism and discrimination.

An insightful takeaway from the discussion was when Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, commented on the difference between actions based on explicit or implicit racism. Explicit racism is directly and consciously believing your own group is superior to others, while implicit racism is unconscious biases or tendencies within an individual.

“It’s amazing how quickly we mobilize around explicit racism,” Metzl said. “But the thing is that that pushes people into implicit racism.”

Metzl went on to say that we should be making more of an effort to mobilize against implicit racism. Although this discussion specifically dealt with racism, its lessons can apply to any form of discrimination. We can’t rely on the mass-produced campaigns or large institutions to catch people’s attention and bring an end to intolerance. As much as it is society’s job to eliminate hatred by reprimanding explicit acts, it is also an individual task to eliminate implicit discrimination. Individuals need to be the ones who set the standard for treating people without judgment.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon puts it best in the Zero Discrimination Day press release by profoundly stating that everyone deserves to live in a world without discrimination.

“Discrimination is a violation of human rights and must not go unchallenged,” Ki-moon said. “Everyone has the right to live with respect and dignity.”

Claire Noack can be reached at noac8702@stthomas.edu.