You are correct, in that treating anyone differently (the woman crossing the street example) on account of race is, by the strict definition, racist.

You are INCORRECT that such is necessarily “bigoted”. As David Wilson noted, there ARE recorded differences. Claiming the causes of these differences often (historically) involved bigoted reasoning (“Blacks have lower IQ bcause they are inherently stupid and inferior to whites” would be an example of that), but simply acknowleging that these differences exist (if one must actually acknowledge racial groups at all, which we apparently must, by government decree) is not bigoted anymore than acknowledging that the vast majority of men are physically stronger than the vast majority of women. It is simply fact.

If I see a black man on the street, it is less unlikely that he is planning to mug me than if I see a white person (all other things being equal); this is statistical fact. BUT there are a lot of other factors in play (many other aspects of appearance are better indicators than race, for instance). of course, if I see a MAN on the street, he is much less unlikely to be planning on mugging me than a woman (all other things being equal); this is also statistical fact.

It does not change the individuals involved. In most cases, neither the black man or the white man is planning on mugging me. In most cases, neither the man or the woman is planning on mugging me. The vast majority of people in this country of both sexes and every race are not violent criminals.

In the vast majority of cases, changing your defensive behaviour regarding another person or group ONLY because of their race is foolish. If the other visual clues about their intentions or danger are sufficient to get you to “cross the street” for a black person, they should also get you to do the same for a white person – the other clues of appearance are MUCH better indicators.

The truth of the matter is that any correlation between behavior and race has, historically, been made using poor methodology and subsequently disproven.

As an example, consider my anecdote above about the RAND study. Racists – people who contend that behavior is dictated by ethnicity – see disproportionate arrest rates for blacks and argue that this is proof of their greater inclination to criminal conduct. But a thorough examination of the facts reveals something quite otherwise.

An individual (frail woman or not) who crosses the street to avoid an individual or group of individuals based solely on their ethnic makeup is, in fact, a racist. One could argue that an individual who avoids a group of males between the ages of 15 and 21 is acting rationally because this is, as I understand it, the most statistically likely group of individuals to engage in criminal conduct. But there is nothing inherent to Bill Cosby’s ethnic makeup that makes him more prone to crime than Jeffrey Dahmer’s.

It would be equally as unacceptable to punish whites more leniently than blacks. It doesn’t matter what the ethnicity of the beneficiary, it is the arbitrary consideration of race that is at issue.

I know that, you know that, but that’s how discrimination against non-blacks (and especially whites) is called here (the literal translation would be “positive discrimination” which is of course exactly the same thing)…
Call it “affirmative action” if you like (and they will, to give it a patina of legallity and dare anyone to speak out against it and be called racist), it’s still discrimination.

“It seems to me that the difficulties in trying to enforce racial equality by law are twofold.”

That depends. If you define equality as ensuring that everyone is treated equally (same crime, same punishment, for example) there should be little problems.
If you mean it (like this example) to mean that the number of penalties handed out should be equal for each race irrespective of the number of members of that race in the entire population, or that minorities should be granted privileges not granted to others on the basis of being a minority (like last month’s dictate in the UK that told police officers to not arrest Muslims for the duration of Ramadan because of their “sensitivities”) it becomes something different entirely.

Several people alrady beat me to it, but I’ll say it anyway: there is no such thing as “reverse racism”. It is, quit simply, racism. It sometimes gets calld “rverse” racism because it is racism that favors/disfavors the opposite groups of historical racism in this country, but it is still racism.

Unless you define “racism” as “the way whites treat blacks”, which I have seen almost verbatim in print as some groups definition. I think we can all agree that such definition is hogwash.

Of course, affirmative acion is also racism, by it’s very definition. Th bst way to get rid of racism is to stop making people think in racist terms… that is, stop doing studies that group people by race. Stop making proclamations about racial groups. Stop pretending that “race” is anything more than a social construct (it actually is, but not in any way that matters at the individual level).

The more people demand recognition, the more people have to treat different racial gruops differently. In short, the more effort you put into looking for racism, the more racism you CREATE.

At some point (probably even today), one could collect 1,000 people and line them up single file, such that the person at one end is the embodiment of “blackness”, the person at the other end is the embodiment of “whiteness” (the perfct Aryan, for example), yet no person is racially distrinct from the person next to them.

It would be fun watching the racists perform their mental gymnastics with that one. Racists from either side (white or black).

The same exercise could then be repeated for any other racial pairs that had problems.

People of all races can be discriminated against. This is an example of going to far.

Here is another reason we have zero tolerance. Parents refuse to accept reasonable discipline so in order to be “fair”, every transgression must meet with the exact same punishment regardless of the circumstances.

All racism has to end. As long as there is racism of any type, there will be problems.

First, the law has an exceedingly difficult time handling differences in inheritance. Obviously, a lot of inequality in opportunity comes from differences in what one inherits economically and, much more importantly, culturally, from one’s parents. We could change this, but only by destroying every incentive to have children and to think of their future, and by giving the government a frightening amount of power.

Second, there is what we might call the “racism of the gaps,” which is the assumption that if we can’t immediately find a nonracist explanation for group disparities, it must be because there isn’t one. This is exceedingly poor logic, amounting to an “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” fallacy. But it is the basis for a awful lot of litigation.

And, no, I don’t have an answer. For that matter, I’ve yet to see an existence proof that there is an answer.

A couple of years ago I sat in on a RAND presentation examining the probability that blacks are more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, even though rates of use are virtually identical.

What the RAND researchers found is that blacks tended to buy/sell/use marijuana in public places and to buy and sell among strangers. Whites, on the other hand, tend to buy and sell only among close friends, and buy/sell/use in private homes, away from public view.

So, it wasn’t a matter of racism that was responsible for a disparity in black/white arrests for marijuana posession so much as it was the way in which the two groups tended to participate in the drug trade.