[lorena33]

I need help with this essay. It is one of the exercises for the entrance examination in a University in Argentina (UBA), I can't find the answer to these questions:
1) What trait can render an individual "targetable"?
2) What is the larger pattern Obama refers to in his quotation? I think that the answer is rankism, please confirm

Here is the transcription of the essay:

Barack Obama is addressing race-based discrimination in a large context. Racial discrimination is but one brand of a more pervasive and still unacknowledged form of abuse and discrimination: Rankism. Other subspecies of rankism are sexim, ageism, ableism, classism, nativism, homophobia, etc. All these "isms" - deemed as discrimination based on social rank - denote a situation in which a more powerful group disadvantages and inflicts indignity on a weaker group. Indignity makes people indignant and resentful, and no one's dignity is secure until everyone's is. The violation of one's dignity leads to indignation - regardless of race.

Despite decodes devoted to eradicating them, these isms cling to life like vampires. After a flurry of initial progress, often marked by the passage of "landmark" legislation, successes become rarer. And their enervating effects continue to diminish the lives of countless individuals who bear a trait that makes them targetable.

The cause of indignity is not rank itself, any more than the cause of racism is color, or the cause of sexism is gender. Color and gender are merely excuses for putting people down to our own advantage. Just as it is impractical to combat recism or sexism by eliminating color or gender differences, so too we cannot eliminate rankism or sexism by eliminating color or gender differences, so too we cannot eliminate rankism by abolishing rank. Rank is not the problem; raqnkism is, and we can learn to disallow the indignities that result form abuses of the power signified by rank much as we learning to disallow color as grounds for discrimination.

Were it not for our partial successes against racism or sexism, the propspect for progress against the social cancer of rankism would be bleak. But increasingly, our tolerance is evaporating for rank-based abuse, whether it takes the form of bullying, personal humilliation, corporate corruption, special interests, elder abuse, celebrety privilege, theological or medical intimidation, animal abuse, environmental degradation, or American exceptionalism. There is good reason to believe that once rankism gets the attention accorded the now -discredited isms, it will become as indefensible as they are.

Obama spoke of the need to see this larger pattern, when he said: "For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances- for bettter health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans - the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.