Because if not, this sounds like a fancy way to dress up racial prejudice.
Because if not, this sounds like a fancy way to dress up racial prejudice.
And even if they did, it would be dumb statistics. If I am murdered, it's 80% likely it'll be by a white guy. But that doesn't mean I should just assume all the white guys I meet are probable murderers. It doesn't even mean that I should take precautions around white guys, however dangerous they are to me, because the odds of a given white dude being a murderer is still very low.
As studies and Nextdoor's experience show, people will racially profile strangers entirely in absence of actual experience. Indeed, as I mentioned elsewhere, people from all-white areas are much more likely to profile, and to do it in exaggerated, hysterical fashion, precisely because they have no real basis to form useful inferences about an entire race of people. Racial profiling is mostly just dressed-up tribalist nonsense. And it has been used in the US to kill thousands of black people [1], at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot
Take a look at FBI crime statistics by race and gender sometime. Witnessing a Asian woman committing a property or violent crime is statistically speaking like winning the lottery. If I was to assess the risk of an Asian woman walking down the street I'd rate the risk as lower than any other demographic group, is that racist and sexist?
If you treat people negatively because of their race, yes, that's racist.