>"Progressives" rail against stereotypes, but they're useful and we naturally form them for a reason - they help us survive. The problem is with people applying stereotypes formed in one environment to another environment where they're not applicable. Just keep that in mind when you're trying to be "woke."
Even if stereotypes acted as a survival mechanism in the past by providing a quick and dirty filter to judge threats through naive correlation and pattern matching, I don't believe they remain useful in the modern world. Modern stereotypes tend to be politically and culturally derived, rather than being the result of natural selection pressure, and so don't actually affect human survival so much as effect the survival of regressive human ideologies.
>Taking a walk alone down a dark alley in a city at night where a rough looking person in a hoody is approaching you from the opposite direction with their hands in their pockets and happens to be a member of the race that is responsible for 90% of the homicides in that city may be enough to change your mind about stereotypes in the modern world...
Well. That's one of the more overtly bigoted comments I've seen here in a while.
It wouldn't change my mind. The assumption one would assume you would expect to be drawn from "the race that is responsible for 90% of the homicides in that city" to "all else being equal, members of that race are likely to be homicidal," is not at all reasonable, or even mathematically justifiable. Anyone approaching you in a dark alley at night could be a threat, and still, on average, most likely isn't, regardless of race.
If this is the best you can do to justify stereotyping as reasonable then I stand by my comment.
Given that scenario, "taking a walk alone down a dark alley in a city at night where a rough looking person in a hoody is approaching you from the opposite direction with their hands in their pockets" the race of the person should not, realistically, play a significant factor in determining the level of threat they present, as compared to the other factors. The bigoted assumption drawn from the made up statistic that the person is a member of "the race that is responsible for 90% of the homicides in that city" is that members of that race, categorically, are significantly more violent than members of other races. Otherwise, it and the statistic wouldn't be worth mentioning.
However, if this were a reasonable assumption to make about members of a race, then the other factors should not be relevant. "Taking a walk down Main Street on a Sunday afternoon when a finely dressed gentleman who happens to be a member of the race that is responsible for 90% of the homicides in that city" would be a far more dangerous scenario to find oneself in than a "rough looking person in a hoody approaching you from the opposite direction with their hands in their pockets who happens to be your own race, in a darkly lit alley."
Within the contrived scenario presented, the stereotype is irrelevant. Outside that scenario, it's absurd.
And.. no one is talking about seeing everyone as an equal threat, or no one as a threat, that's a weird non-sequitur you're projecting onto my comment. Likewise, not being paranoid about certain races will not inevitably get you killed and prevent you from breeding.
What I am claiming is that the stereotype you're trying to justify here as a valid survival mechanism is not.
I don't see the point in ignoring race, or any other physical traits. It's almost as if when it comes to survival some people would rather be dead than being seen as a bigot or racist.
When the details of the situation you are in start to fit the common parameters of stories you hear that's when you need to be on high alert.
For instance, I doubt most people will think twice if they pass a woman in an alley, no matter how she's dressed. Females mugging and killing people just isn't a thing you hear about all that often. So you take your chances.
Likewise a man of any race wearing a suit is probably not going to be perceived as any kind of threat either.
Could these people be threats? Of course, but statistically it is unlikely.
Likewise, if you are somewhere where a member of a race has never killed anybody, you probably would feel at ease around those people. Or maybe it's an area where crime is low in general all around, then perhaps you walk in peace and freely ignore everyone as a threat.
It has nothing to do with being a bigot or a racist, it's all about being aware of past patterns that have led to people's deaths and avoiding them.
Your body is trained to look for sugar. If you just eat what your body tells you to eat, you get diabetes really quickly. I think something has likewise disrupted the parts of your brain responsible for threat analysis.
Part of the problem is that black culture in America has glorified being a "gangsta." As a result you have a lot of nice, decent individuals who comport themselves in a way that communicates negative things to people who aren't immersed in that culture enough to know better.
Nor should they need to know better. Being a gangster should be a universally reprehensible thing, like being a drug dealer, or gang banger, or mafioso. Gangsters are killers and thieves.
I think there's an oversimplification here, that seeing someone's race is going to determine your reaction. You see lots of things in that same second. You see their clothes, their posture, gait, and other body language. In fact, those other things may be easier to determine than skin tone is, particularly at night. Clothes and body language may correlate with race or ethnicity, but there's no direct causal relationship.
You mention race because it's a lot easier to categorize based on race than based on a hundred different clothing and body language parameters, but it's those complex non-racial, non-ethnic things that really make your decision for you about whether someone is likely to be a threat.
Many more blacks or hispanics, on the street in an inner city or bad neighborhood, may exhibit nerve-inducing fashion sense or body language, but you're still not nervous about their race, you're nervous about those other things, and the location (alley? possibly late at night?), and forming a post-hoc explanation based on race because it's cognitively simpler.
While this is true to a degree, a lot of that response is conditional on race. If I see an Asian man dressed like a thug in the US or western Europe, that comes off to me like aesthetics/posturing and probably not a threat. A black man presenting the same way is significantly more likely to trip my threat meter. That might not be the most "woke" response but from a statistical standpoint I'll stand behind it 100%.
Even if stereotypes acted as a survival mechanism in the past by providing a quick and dirty filter to judge threats through naive correlation and pattern matching, I don't believe they remain useful in the modern world. Modern stereotypes tend to be politically and culturally derived, rather than being the result of natural selection pressure, and so don't actually affect human survival so much as effect the survival of regressive human ideologies.