I would agree with you on this, but I’m not sure whether most people would. Consider if we look race and make some claims like, generally, blacks are better athletes or more likely to have been imprisoned, many people may consider making that generalization, even if they were backed up with statistics, to be racist. I’ve even seen a situation where someone was offended when it was said that blacks are more likely to suffer certain medical conditions that whites.
I think there’s generally a little more leeway with gender because the biological differences are far greater between genders than races, like height or muscle mass. Once you start drifting away from stuff like that, I’ve seen people take offense, for instance, implications that women tend to be more emotional than men or men tend to be more logical than women.
That is, I think many people see a recognition of differences of a particular population is somehow a difference in equality. If this is someone’s definition of sexism, then being non-sexist is impossible in any age, barring extreme genetic engineering to the point where men and women are virtually indistinguish.
This is when it’s bad, when using a generalization to assume something must be or must not be true about a specific individual. I also think this is something that is potentially possible in today’s society, but it does take an enormous amount of discipline because of our culture emphasizing certain generalizations.
As we all can strive to judge individuals based upon their merits rather than upon their race, sex, or whatever else, then even if it’s not possible to be completely non-sexist, it’s at least possible to get pretty darn close.
I agree, and in fact in my last post I considered adding an exception for certain “sensitive” statements. That is, I think that there are things you can say that aren’t technically racist / sexist / whatever, but are likely to cause offence.
This is partly because of the make-up of our society and the prevelance of a victim meme among certain groups. But also it is because of our history.
w.r.t. black people for example, many a time I’ve had a conversation with someone that began with them saying black people tend to be better dancers, or sprinters say, but then went on into racist territory. Therefore when someone mentions those kinds of things now, I begin to suspect that the person is racist.
I think it is important though to be clear about what technically is racist, and what isn’t. Because racists often have difficulty understanding what racism is, and invoke the strawman claim that there are no possible generalisations, which no-one is suggesting.