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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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