Gingerism

Here's a joke. "What's the difference between a terrorist and a redhead?"
Here's the punchline. "You can negotiate with a terrorist."

BBC news reports that abuse of redheads continues in England . The headline: "Is Gingerism as bad as racism?" ("ginger" being a derogatory term for redheaded people)
According to some, it is:

Photographer Charlotte Rushton has been chronicling the UK's redheads for a book, Ginger Snaps. Of the 300 she snapped, only two have been spared bullying because of their hair. She herself has suffered verbal abuse from complete strangers.
In adult life, women get stereotyped and red-haired men take much of the worst abuse. Treatment of red-haired children in school ranges from mild taunts to grim persecution. Michele Eliot, the American director of British children's charity Kidscape, regularly has significant numbers of red-haired children in courses on coping with bullying.

I've never heard of this - the idea of picking on people with red hair seems so bizarre that I thought for a while this was some kind of joke. But the comments section seemed legit. Jo Hobbs, of Leicester, writes:

I cannot begin to describe, as a redhead, just how offensive I find the term "ginger". Yet I've heard colleagues and friends use it freely in conversation in reference to a redheaded individual or even direct to my face without batting an eyelid. Maybe they don't realise that years of verbal, and occasionally physical, abuse can be recalled in an instant with the utterance of that one word. I have long felt that such a term should be treated with the same seriousness as those used negatively to describe someone's ethnicity, race, etc.