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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.
By that reasoning being forced to use a segregated water fountain isn't discrimination either, as long as the water quality isn't different between the fountains.
This is the Internet autist argument. "They're just showing social disdain for black people. Social disdain causes them no material problems, so it isn't discrimination and doesn't harm them. It's just feelings! Who cares about feelings?" Avoiding people partly based on their race is race-based harm. It may be necessary under some circumstances, but don't kid yourself about what it has become necessary to do.
... Do you seriously not see the difference between a measure that restricts the volition of others, versus a measure that doesn't?
Anyways, you're still missing the point. Just address the OPs thesis that we should be spending more effort holding people accountable for acts of bigotry and less effort for holding people accountable for feelings of bigotry. Do you disagree with that premise? I'm not going to be pulled into the orthogonal argument you clearly want to have until you at least admit that it is orthogonal. Good faith debate is one person claims "A" and the other person claims "Not A." You are claiming B. Arguing against A will not establish B. Arguing for B will not defeat A.
It isn't "restricting the volition of others" in the sense meant by libertarians, to fail to allow you to use someone else's property, and to use force when you attempt to do so anyway.
I think that like a lot of advice, some people need it more and some people need it less. People on social media (or regular media) probably need to care about feelings of bigotry less. People here probably need to care about it more. Hurting someone's feelings is actually important. Yes, sometimes people's feelings get hurt too easily, but I deny that having someone avoid you because of your race is such a case.
Okay I can tell we're getting into bravery debate territory here (not your fault, I think even OP was aware of the doodoo they were stepping in.) Trying to phrase this neutrally though... If you were the racism tsar (but otherwise kept your values) and could magically alter all government-sponsored antiracism messaging within the united states to one of the following options, which would you choose?
I think OPs argument is in line with point two, assuming limited anti-bigltry resources.
I don't know how libertarians use it. I'm using it in the sense that I would be a lot more offended by someone refusing to let me use a waterfountain than refusing to park their car near me. I would still be sad about the car thing, but I would rather more resources be spent fighting the waterfountain thing.
Hurting people feelings isn't not important, but I think OPs point (which I agree with), is that we are weighing the prevention of hurt feeling too highly relative to other antiracist goals.
By definition I'd be aiming the messaging at the public, not the people here, and the public needs different advice than the people here. Furthermore, I pointed out that avoiding black people because of crime might be necessary and racist at the same time and I wouldn't message people to avoid necessary things. It also raises the question of what counts as "bigoted acts", since most people would think that avoiding a group of people based on race is a bigoted act.
So my answer is "probably the first option, but it's completely irrelevant".
There's a famous joke I could invoke here, but I'll just say that "we" is made of different groups that need different advice. I'm sure there are people on tumblir who are weighing hurt feelings too highly. I don't think people on themotte are weighing them anywhere near that much.
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No. There is a massive difference between a group of young Asian guys and black guys hanging out. Basic stats will tell you this.
Yes there are other indicators (eg if they were all wearing suits you’d feel more comfortable). But if you understand crime stats, being black is highly predictive in the same way being male is.
Advanced stats will tell you otherwise. Do you not know what a factor analysis is?
It literally isn't though. If you keep everything constant except sex, male vs female is still HUGELY predictive of criminality. If you keep everything constant except race, the relationship is much, much weaker. Your counterargument is going to be that things are not, on average, kept constant-- but that's still not a convincing reason to look at mostly proxy factors for criminality (like race) rather than much more causitice factors like SES.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11868975/
Black women murder at a rate higher than Asian men. Black women murder rate similar to white male rate.
> Poster specifically mentions factor analysis
> Blithely replies with yet another topline aggregate statistic
That's a statistical non-sequitur.
That’s just silly. Untangling which factor is causing what is incredibly challenging since you can’t really run a natural experiment. But the stats are so extreme that dismissing race because it makes OO uncomfortable is irrational.
That is, both posters make a claim on what causes crime. I respond with stats that show facially a pretty strong issue for OP’s claim. OP cannot simply cite factor analysis without simply privileging his hypothesis.
This is also an area where publishing anything that supports my hypothesis is career suicide (eg see what happened when academics published results showing police killing was not racial predicted). Therefore, you would expect no one in the academy to attempt to prove my hypothesis—it is verboten to even consider it.
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Are you sure? I don't have a link, but I remember saying breakdowns by sex, age, and race, where the criminality statistics for blacks looked pretty dismal (black women coming out worse than white men).
Again, I'm pretty sure SES is also just a proxy, and actually a poorer one than race.
So I went out and tried to find a study about this and found a reddit comment that links to a study you might be interested in:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/4957dc/are_there_studies_comparing_us_crime_rates_by/d0p7aqn/
I can see the outline for a counterargument that goes, "race is causative of ethnicity (meaning: race linked culture), which is causative of marital status of parents, immigrant status, etcetera, which are causative of violence." Again, though... You can just filter on the direct causes instead. Fatherless behavior looks similar regardless of race, and regardless of race I would discriminate against young men engaged in it.
Just think about base rates here. People are very unlikely to commit violent crimes in general, regardless of race. But there are particular adjectives that you can apply to people that significantly raise their threat level. Imagine you have a database of every person (on earth/in your country/in your city/whatever), and a query that filters that database to only the subset that matches all adjectives in a list. Your goal is to minimize the average likelyhood of the people returned by that query committing a crime against you. In which order would you prioritize removing adjectives from the following list?
[Black fatherless poor druggie young male]
I would go for either "druggie" or "male" first, then after those two are gone "poor", then either "young" or "fatherless".
Plausibly there are some co-correlations, where the intersection of two adjectives interact to make things particularly bad... But I'd guess that in most of the cases where that happens with "Black", that's more attributable to discrimination than to afroamerican culture.
Sure, I'm quite inclined to see fatherlessness as causative, but doesn't it give you pause that we were just talking about SES, sex, and age as causative, and we're moving on to fatherlessness without skipping a beat?
Look at the numbers from zeke. I don't see how you can put either sex or age before race. You can find similar results for SES.
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Do you see young Asian guys loitering in the hood often?
I wasn’t in the hood
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...Yes? Asians are tightwads, so they live in the hood, and they stay up real late and like to go out and about.
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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.
I actually ran into this in real life. Not contrived. I was dropping my then fiancé off in NYC at our apartment when I was having to drive somewhere else. I was going to drop her off on one end of the block since I would’ve had to drive around a few blocks given the one way nature of streets.
I noticed a group of young black men and re calibrated. My then fiancé asked me why I hadn’t drop her off at that end of the street. When I explained, she thought it was racist. I explained it was Bayesian and in any event did no harm to the young black men.
I’m curious if my now wife would have the same attitude today.
Based. #CoupleGoals: The couple that dapper-man-at-gas-stations together stays together. Protecting your and your wife's safety matters more than protecting the feelings of blacks and progressives.
I've long had a hypothesis that part of the reason why women generally prefer boyfriends/husbands who are chuddier than themselves is because, consciously or not, women like being able to outsource the Emotional Labor of wrongthinking so they don't have to be the bad person.
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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?
I don't think it has a strong moral valence either way.
Part of the modern discourse disconnect I didn't really mention is also how we mentally model feelings. I think some progressives believe (and this isn't actually all that unreasonable) that your feelings are so strongly interconnected with each other across scenarios. In that model, it would be bad, because this emotion of "danger" would inevitably bleed over to other innocuous situations (for example, maybe you then innately also feel even a Black coworker in a white collar workplace to be somehow more 'dangerous' than other colleagues, all else equal).
I disagree on two fronts with this progressive logic. First I think context is pretty strong in these situations. Second I think progressives often are very guilty of assuming all emotions are equally valid and real (and thus by implication must be sourced in some internalized attitude). Flatly speaking this is just wrong. Humans do not actually have amazing control over their emotions, and it's not uncommon for emotions to show up that aren't even all that deeply connected to the fabric of our existence and attitudes. They just show up. Rather than judge the emotion, we should judge the reaction to them, and feel free to discard them at times. Obviously we aren't like, ignorant or unaware of emotions - sometimes we do need to process them - but they shouldn't dominate our lives in every single regard, and we can generate emotions too to some extent (not just be dominated by them).
Progressives are correct that emotions can be data worthy of self-reflection (if I see a Black guy and feel uncomfortable, why might that be?), but they've messed up the scale of the matter pretty badly (it's absolutely not something automatically worthy of a moral panic).
Perhaps, but some emotions are very easy to judge this way (anger leading to violence), and some emotions are very difficult to judge this way (fear leading to sabotage).
It's extraordinarily difficult to judge sabotage, both in that it happened, as well as what impact it actually had. And some forms of sabotage are known by other names, like "prudent business practice" or "protecting women and girls", where society at large can't even decide what is/isn't, and that's not even getting into the associated moral hazards from each group that would benefit from the laws against that kind of sabotage being stricter or looser. Oh yeah, and some elements of sabotage are personally profitable for whoever's doing them, and some people care less or more about that, and...
True, but see above, so the saboteurs are far more likely to get away with failing to control themselves. It's pretty easy to judge people who generate within themselves anger and then go out and get in a fight (hard to hide bruises or broken limbs). It's very hard to judge people who generate within themselves anger (or fear) and then go out and sabotage their domestic enemy with -ism or drowning them in an ocean of what-if. There's just no hard evidence that [progressives and the emotions they're responsible for] are harmful in any way, and since our system is set up for benefit-of-the-doubt, you can't catch them without going full RICO (which, it's worth noting, is exactly how laws mandating discrimination already work against their targets: a progressive would argue that law discriminates against Italians and be correct).
It is very likely that a panopticon society would be capable of prosecuting this, but the nature of/reasons such a society arises means it could only ever target the innocent. Ancient societies squared the circle by pre-emptively convicting [the gender of person more likely to cause sabotage by emotion] of that sabotage and limiting their opportunities to do that, but that filter punished most those who could control their emotions (and if we're going by contribution to economy, men and women are pretty equal in an age of automation so a more granular system is needed anyway).
Difficult to get a wo/man to understand something when her/his salary depends on her/him not understanding it.
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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 mostly 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 combined moral value 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.2"
2 The unspoken third (and IMO most likely) scenario is that whites simply don't bother with any kind of uplift and instead resume the course of history that was set in motion in 1492 and put on pause circa the mid 20th century, as described by Teddy Roosevelt:
But as far as I know, the rampant criminality of the black lumpenproletariat, as alluded to by Rev Jackson, was largely the combined consequence of various policies and reforms initiated during the Great Society project of the ‘60s. And it wasn’t until the emergence of the narrative about ‘super predators’ that it turned into a relevant political issue in the US, and that was in the early ‘90s. I know the War on Drugs played into all of it, but the idea that it was all just a veiled exercise of intentionally pandering to racist whites is pretty much a case of retcon on the part of Blue Tribe culture warriors.
Historically speaking, this is a rather recent development, so I doubt you can draw such sweeping conclusions about American society based on this.
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