We really have to stop seeing people as members of a group first and an individual second. It is lazy thinking.
These are fundamentals of the Universe, as such.
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[0] - communication transcends distance now, and if something of importance happens anywhere in the world, almost everyone else on the planet knows about it in real-time.
Couldn't agree more, but I read the gp as being descriptive, not prescriptive. While I think we should work to be better, I think some people need to be more realistic in their expectations of time scale. That is, stop being so upset that human nature didn't change today because you said it was bad yesterday.
You meet someone in a deserted street, you have the same three seconds to evaluate their threat potential that your ape ancestors had.
Rule of law and working policing changes everything about your reactions to other people. In a typical western country, most of the time you feel threatened just by seeing someone on the street, you're imagining it (proof: count how many times "feeling threatened" turned into "actually being threatened"). Other people don't want to go into jail either, and violence achieves very little compared to patience and civil agreements.
But this is a sort of thing we still can handle real-time, reading things off each others' faces as we go along. Where the charade breaks down is all of our intuitions about state of the world, as we consume mass media.
Humans run on availability heuristic[0]. Quoting from the Wiki, "availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled". Mass media give us heavily filtered view of the world, which does not, in any way, correspond to the real world we live in. Thanks to news reporting, you feel like you're surrounded by rich and beautiful people, constantly threatened by gangs and terrorists, and that everything around you is going to shit. None of that is true, and yet even knowing that, we all have trouble handling it in our heads.
The heuristics we are born with were optimized for small and very localized group of people, not for large, dense populations, and constant light-speed communication with everyone else on the planet.
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I don't think that's what danieltillett was calling for at all. Rather, I think he was arguing for not letting group-level categorisations - such as gender or race - totally dominate over and blind us to attributes of individuals that may differ from what we would expect from our preconceived stereotypes of groups. Because when we do that with race, we do recognise that as racist - maybe not when the race in question is white, but in other cases, yes.