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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.
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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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