This may actually be. I haven’t seen any reports on this, but if you say you have, I won’t disbelieve you.

I do agree that we can’t change pseudo-racist cognitive errors with laws, but that instead we need to address the root causes and inequities, such as poverty. We’re not post-racial because there are still plenty out there who are disadvantaged.

Regardless, I have no problem giving up on most of that claim. A seemingly racist response remains perfectly natural if it’s merely the case that the unkempt man is more likely to be black than white. The natural human tendency to generalize from experience is then going to color our judgments. It’s a cognitive error, but the effects of white people associating black people with violent crime is not something that you can stamp out with laws governing behavior that emerges from that. As I think we agree on, the problem that we -can- try to address is the statistical association of blacks and violent crime, primarily by addressing poverty issues.

I disagree, and the problem is with “similarly-kempt.” If both men are similarly kempt, then the assumption that the black man is more likely to harbor ill intentions is based solely on his skin color, and that’s unreasonable. True, it may be more likely that the unkempt man you encounter in that alley is black than white, and that’s precisely the problem.

I’d argue that we’ve hit an equilibrium point with respect to race relations, and that the current set of laws doesn’t actually do much to change the culture – that the Voting Rights Act can’t do more than it already has to make itself obsolete. At this point, a lot of racism is what might be called ‘natural’, where much of the race-based difference in our actions and attitudes is explicable as the result of seeing patterns between and among racial groups in society. For example, it’s perfectly reasonable to be leerier of entering a dark alley that has a black man standing in it than one with a similarly-kempt white man (and you’ve almost nothing at all to worry about if it’s a woman standing there), and that reaction doesn’t just turn off like a light when in situations that aren’t as dangerous. It’s just that facts about things like education levels and crime rates color our judgments. I don’t think higher-level racism is going to be diminished much further without policy that works to change these patterns in society, which the current set of laws don’t really prioritize. I think a different kind of civil rights regime is necessary now.