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The problem of our modern age is that even very smart people are not very good at divorcing the “group dynamics” from the “individual dynamics”. Motte and Baileys specifically also don’t help here.
There are stereotypes, and many of them are rooted in truth. You may justifiably take some actions that reflect these stereotypes and that’s fine. What’s not fine is the small subset of people who seem to have no sense of tradeoffs - they turbocharge stereotypes with seemingly no upper bound to how powerful these stereotypes are.
Then there are your actions on a personal, individualized level. Meaning usually the recipient of these actions and attitudes. This is the crux of the disconnect. It might be fine for me as a salesperson to avoid marketing to, say, Hispanics. But if a specific Hispanic customer comes in, I shouldn’t treat them differently. Why? Well the most powerful piece is that I consider their identity as a human being to trump their identity as a Hispanic by at least an order of magnitude if not more. The second piece is that we want to live in a society that treats people fairly and sometimes it requires locally suboptimal choices to achieve a globally optimal result. This requires a degree of personal ethics.
If my neighbor goes on a rant about how Black people are bringing in all kinds of crime to the area, I might think it’s uncharitable, or maybe factually incorrect, and I might even think a little less of them… these are societal tensions that are understandable though, in the general sense. I’m not going to treat my neighbor way different based only on that. But it’s a degree of magnitude worse (or maybe two) if my neighbor then deliberately gives the cold shoulder to a Black family that moves in on our block.
Do you see what happened? He crossed the boundary line from stereotyping to personal racism. Which has a word: discrimination. This is a serious moral failing. Whereas the act of stereotyping is relatively speaking vastly more neutral. Discrimination is an action. Sure it might be sourced from an attitude, but there’s a big step there.
The waters get muddied because bad actors (and also overly defensive otherwise good people!) often retreat to the Bailey here. Some might assume that a stereotyper will also discriminate based purely on the presence of a stereotypical belief they hold. This is, well, understandable but bad, a lesser form of the same pattern of discrimination. It also provokes hard feelings because words like “racist” or “sexist” are pretty charged. On the other side of the coin sometimes a discriminator will defend their behavior by pointing to the stereotype as truth. I wish to call this out as bullshit. They are different things with different moral stakes.
And then you have a small handful of people who react to approbation with extremism. Not only are all these stereotypes true, they think, they are strong, they are universally applicable, and individualized discrimination is sometimes not even just a necessary evil but somehow good or wise. There are a few of them on this forum. Only IRL experience can pull them back from the brink, so words can’t really reach them. Usually this is a race thing, but you see the same pattern with the most notorious of incels. Think Elliot Rodger. They take some (maybe rooted in truth!) belief about women but then apply it with such a broad brush to individuals in their lives that it creates a cycle of unhappiness (on top of being unethical).
Anyways, your particular case is a classic. I would argue the woman on the street is fundamentally in a group-dynamic, stereotype paradigm. She is not levying an individualized discrimination. She’s being realistic about a mostly-true stereotype. If she were to follow up her statement with “and so as a rule I don’t date Black guys” then we have a problem. That’s discrimination because it ignores the humanity of individuals (and also creates hard feelings that are often counterproductive on a societal level). I realize this is not always cut and dry (what if she says “and so I’m reluctant to date Black guys?”) but I strongly believe we should save the vast majority of the moral approbation for this kind of specific individualized behavior. Kindness is a bit of a skill.
We (as a society, but particularly this is directed at liberals and moderates) need to (relative to current effort) speak up stronger against discrimination and not so strongly against garden variety stereotypes. It may be true that one leads to the other by tendency and in chronological order, but the focus should be on weakening the link. Conservatives by the same token (relative to current effort) need to call out those individuals that cross the line away from “mere” stereotypes and into outright discrimination better and not hide them behind a shield of persecution, victimhood, circling the wagons, or playing the Bailey card.
Why is gender “better” at avoiding discrimination? Because the link between stereotypes and individual behavior is weaker, as it should be. Women who spout off frustration at “men” as a category are one thing (common), women who treat specific men in their life like dirt because of those frustrations are another thing (thankfully less common and less accepted as morally fine). Simple as that. We should learn from this model and apply it to other areas where discrimination is problematic.
It’s late at night. You are looking for a street parking spot. Nearby an open spot, there are a group of young black men loitering. Is it wrong for you to avoid that spot and try to find another spot?
If it is wrong, then I question why being moral is even worthwhile.
I think this you're missing @EverythingIsFine 's whole point because you present this situation as a counterargument to his "we should care more about discrimination than stereotyping" spiel, but in your situation no one is actually being discriminated against. Is having a car parked next to you a public good?
If you were interviewing for a job and trashed their resumes in the basis if their race, then there would be something to talk about. But while having a particular negative attitude about some identifiable group is not necessarily a good thing (and indeed may in fact be a bad thing), the OP was very specifically saying that society should be less concerned about that than it is.
... And in any case, I think "black" is far from the most predictive factor here. "Young" and "men" are hugely predictive, and treating people differently based on their age and gender is good, actually (🇻🇦). But what decides my perception of (other) young men as safe is primarily their presentation of class status and upbringing. I would feel plenty safe around any group of young men wearing suits, carrying college textbooks, holding hobby objects (e.g. skateboards, cameras, basketballs), engaging in a church event, etcetera. I would feel about equally unsafe regardless of race around a group of young men that are drunk, smoking pot in public, blasting loud music, wearing excessively baggy clothes, etcetera. If you pressed me, I would admit that I probably felt slightly more unsafe around a low-class afroamerican group than a low class white or latino group, but race genuinely does not rank very high in my factor analysis.
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Another race discussion, another of a slight variant on the same, very contrived "dark road at night" scenario. At some point you start to wonder if it's just a lack of originality, or there really aren't any other similar 'gotcha' scenarios out there. I welcome more substantive comments, if you have them. And I know for a fact there was more you could have responded to there.
Obviously a new spot, fine. No one is pretending that tradeoffs don't exist. Even Jesus, the super (mostly) pacifist, didn't advocate for being an idiot:
Safety tradeoffs are especially significant. Groups of men alone on the street at night is not a normal innocent thing either, that's somewhat race-independent. And it's also a group-level dynamic, at least mostly. The question is really only tangentially related to morality, and is a straw man. As the scripture says, it's possible to be wise, and also maintain an ethical purity that reveals itself in other situations. Also, we often have more than binary choices available to us, and I think people often underestimate the presence of these third-way options that leave everyone happier.
Suppose one is simply walking down the sidewalk at night, hears footsteps, turns around, and is relieved to see a white person? Is that moral?
Really, this is what the entire edifice of anti-racism boils down to. Living in a white society is a daily humiliation ritual for any non-white person (east asians partially excluded) with even a moderate sense of racial identity, especially blacks. The psychological harm from Noticing all the ways in which your people don't stack up is real1, and insofar as you place the moral weight of non-whites above that of whites, it is in fact immoral to perpetuate the behaviors/institutions that cause such unfavorable comparisons. Hence, Woke.
1 N.B: This is why the popularization of HBD ideas will simply never happen in any non-racially exclusionary society. With the context of HBD, the message from conservatives to blacks (and other underperforming minorites) goes from "your community has serious problems, but with some elbow grease you might just be able to fix them" to "your dysfunction is congenital, your people are fundamentally lesser, and there's no way of fixing it without either Deus Ex Machina technology or centuries of strict and likely externally-imposed breeding control."
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Would it still be wrong to give them the cold shoulder if they were blasting loud rap music at all hours, street racing, and selling drugs? If they actually live up to the stereotypes, is it wrong to treat them differently?
Like it's one thing to give the cold shoulder to a black family that, for lack of a better descriptor, acts white. But if they actually match several of the stereotypes then I don't see the issue.
See? Again with the "them". (Genuinely not trying to be nitpicky and you didn't mean it that way - a family is a plural noun - but hopefully you'll allow the point.) I'm not talking about "them". I'm talking about specific people. I'm saying that if you see the new black family and then expect them to act per negative stereotypes and then that comes across even when you first meet them and say hi, that's bad. It's true that humans and especially modern Americans aren't super great at "firewalling" the two things, which the whole 'microaggressions' thing was a somewhat deluded and misplaced crusade at affecting, but it does take effort to extend some charity especially at first.
And of course you did list purely and universally negative stereotypes. The family could equally as well bring humor, food, a neighborly sense of watching out for the kids, hospitality, a deep faith, etc. Of course, there are some "culture-clash" values or practices that are a bit more value-neutral than selling drugs/blaring music at 2am/street racing that cause friction, sure. I'm not going to claim that all cultures and practices are of equal value either. But you have to admit starting out with "white = universally good" is not a great building block. I'll still stand by what I said though. It's really not all that bad if that's the true belief you have, but you have to be honest with yourself about whether it might bleed through or not. Only God will judge us by the contents of our heart, for everyone else in society, we have to make do with actual behaviors.
If you get right down to it most of us agree about this, but I think it's really easy to let the politically charged parts distract from it. And it tends to be a more prosperous and mentally healthy mindset to boot, when you default to trust rather than default to suspicion. That's the secret sauce of humanity's success and I don't think tech has changed it too much.
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I mean, if you watch the video, she basically admits to to most of her boyfriends being white, partially for stereotypical reasons. She actually has a whole video in depth talking about the issue dating black men as a black women.
I breezed through a rough transcript, but found it pretty interesting. Insofar as an internet dude can pass judgement, I think I'm actually going to declare her very much "not guilty" of the charge of discrimination. That's the opposite of her message. I ended up quoting a bit from it because I think there are some interesting nuggets of discussion inside. (I should also note that this video you linked is not the OP's video about NYC guys)
I'll say first of all, she talks about how Black women used to think about Black-Black relationships as "loyalty" but that's by the wayside - good! There's enough problems trying to find a lifelong marriage partner to have to restrict yourself to an eighth of the population (or less) out of some vague, ill-defined sense of loyalty. I think Black Power and the associated feelings were super important to the Black community for a few decades, but no longer serve their best interests so to speak.
And yes, she gets very frank with the statistics. But that's exactly where statistics should be used, yes? At least when assessing what we might call "dating strategy".
She also talks about how Black men have internalized some of the double standards that hit Black women especially hard, and you know what? That's true. I absolutely, positively cannot stand Jasmine Crockett. But I will say that the notion that, as she says, "we are never enough: we're too dark, or we're too loud, we're too demanding, we're ghetto, we're ratchet, we are all of these things" is probably tough - (especially Black) women DO need to walk a bit of a tightrope without any traits that are too "extreme". (Men actually DO have a parallel to this as well, especially when it comes to sexuality, but that's another conversation for another time). And media representation of Black women is an exercise in true whiplash (and yes, Black creators are partially to blame). The problems of race, both "self" inflicted and otherwise, are real, even if they aren't defining. Then we get I think the heart of the rant (apologies for poor formatting but I don't want to spend forever correcting the auto-generated transcript):
So basically she's saying that Black women in particular are tired of having a victim mindset. Great! I agree that's a very exhausting place to be, at the very least on a permanent basis. Does that come with some judgement for the men? Yes. But to me this is still speaking to group-level dynamics, with a dash of normal sexist-like expectations.
This makes me wonder how much of her rant is itself stereotypes, or media consumption, vs how much might be personal experience. I think that would change a bit about how I feel about what she's saying! But alas, we don't really get any extra information here. Her next complaint is, I'm going to be honest, this is just a man thing. It's not a Black man thing:
So yeah. Standard complaints with a racial undertone. She's got this aside that's a theory about the specific pairing of white women and Black men:
Honestly? Interesting theory. Maybe even true? I'm a bit skeptical still. But I think when it comes down to her main message it's pretty clear:
Love it. Treat people like people. Endorsed. With maybe a little note of you know, it takes two to tango and put investment in the relationship, but time and place and all that.
I mean yeah that might be her message overall, but I cant help but feel, intuitively, that there would be a deliberate avoidance to dating black men on her part, just based on the 1st NYC video, even if she wouldnt encourage her audience to think in this way directly. It is harder to date black men as a black women, she knows this, and she very likely avoids dating black men because of it. I think that this is ok for what its worth. But I dont think she is entirely free of non-discrimination. Besides that, sexual selection is the one aspect of life that is always discriminatory, and people have the right to do it, based on race or whatever characteristics, because someone has a right to decide who they want to sleep with, period.
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