Okay, I get what you’re saying now.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
Bear in mind that if you lock car doors when strangers approach, if it’s a black man, he may reasonably believe you locked the doors because of race.
[/QUOTE]
Who cares what he thinks?
Gavin de Becker (in The Gift of Fear) makes the same point I attempted to make when I taught self-defense, especially women’s self-defense.
Pay attention to your gut.
People tell you who they are. You just have to listen. If you are wasting time worrying if your perceptions are politically correct or not, your attention is direceted inward, and you aren’t listening. That’s how people get hurt.
Regards,
Shodan
This is the exact sort of specious logic that leads people to be suspicious of leaving men alone with children. Afterall, the vast majority of child molesters are men.
Specifically, it’s what RationalWiki calls the “Fallacy of the Transposed Conditional.” Here’s one good explanation:
Thread winner right here.
[QUOTE=Machine Elf]
This is the exact sort of specious logic that leads people to be suspicious of leaving men alone with children. Afterall, the vast majority of child molesters are men.
[/QUOTE]
Agreed. Life is too short to be that fucking paranoid.
I think it’s worth pointing out, though, that any woman who gets attacked by a strange man is going to be blamed for not being more cautious. I’ve heard folks on this very board liken women walking by themselves in isolated places to flaunting an expensive watch in a poor neighborhood. It’s not uncommon for a man to think it’s perfectly sensible to avoid strange men unless the strange man being avoided happens to be himself. I’m not sure how to win that game.
This is doubly stupid because most assaults don’t happen that way.
I think my wife’s just worried I’ll drop him or teach him some bad habits.
Yeah, but he’s on the other side of a locked door, so who cares?
How does someone “tell you who they are” by walking down the street near your car?
I spent 20 years living in the city with the highest murder rate in Florida. I lock my doors. All the time. Car door, house door. I have a charley bar under my front doorknob and a bar on the slider. I live in a second-floor apartment in a mostly-crime-free town in Massachusetts. It’s habit.
But really, people. Lock your damn car door when you get in. There, no angst about if the person walking down the street thinks you locked the door because of him/her.
P.S. I also really like Gavin de Becker’s books.
By what they do. Also by tiny bits of body language. By things we don’t necessarily pick up on logically – those signals end up as “gut reactions”.
For example, I would be concerned if I were at a stop light and someone walking down the sidewalk paid undue attention to me, or moved from the far side of the sidewalk to one closer to my vehicle.
In this day & time IMO any woman who is alone, anybody really, who does not lock their car doors 99% of the time is asking for trouble.
Situational awareness is not paranoia or racism IMO. And I don’t have to even be consciously thinking about danger, it is just running in the background.
The warning bell will go off if I do not catch it in the forefront.
I pay attention to my gut.
Coons?
And if this group of young black men behaved similar behavior but dressed in Armani suits, Gucci loafers, and apparently just off a 9-5 job?
This example is a nice demonstrating that the idea of judging solely by race or gender doesn’t happen in the real world, and the OP is a bit of a red herring.
There’s a lot of nice assumptions here that we can analyze. The fact that these men are young is one. So, would it matter if they were in the 80s and needed walkers to move about? Would they pose much of a threat even if they made harassing comments?
They hang around in groups in mini-malls. So, they presumably aren’t supporting traditional suburban families with 9-5 jobs?
Are they dressed a certain way? Presumably not in suits. What does their clothing say about their social status?
Are they really only harassing white women? Or do we just not notice as much when the harassment occurs to minority women?
So, race/gender is really an oversimplification here. This hypothetical woman isn’t judging relative risk based on race/gender but by a mix of a range of visual and aural cues that signals the age, race, gender, social status, economic status, etc of this group of men to heuristically make that judgment. And that makes sense, even if sometimes our estimate of true risk can be totally off the mark.
Clearly, you aren’t judging people solely by their gender or race (or a mix of only these two) or even suggesting it.
But some people do, and it supports their arguments for gender/race prejudice better if they can pretend people ignore all that other stuff. And this may be where you are getting a bit off the mark. This hypothetical woman is probably not going to judge much risk at a similarly aged group of suited men on a Sunday who have come to a mini-mall directly from a church across the street, off-color remarks notwithstanding.
It’s an example of what people say without using the N-word but keeping with the flavor of the original message. The point being that I should have learned not to date that type of person just because one out of millions did a stupid thing when drunk. The point of my post in this thread is to direct your fear to individuals who are posing a high possibility of harming you; not a whole race of people just because.
In fact, I’ve always wondered why that particular name was used to refer to black people, because raccoons aren’t black. 
I guess I just don’t get racism and wouldn’t make a good Klan member.
And then there is someone like Jesse Jackson:
“There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
According to old Wikkipedia (Turkey in the Straw - Wikipedia), it grew out of the ministrel tradiation.
Did you read the book? No, of course you didn’t or you wouldn’t have asked the question.
Read the book.
This is dumb. Sex doesn’t matter. Color doesn’t matter.
If the person is being sketchy then take precautions.
I lock my doors because there’s a strange person**** nearby, regardless of race or gender or dress or whatever. There have been crimes reported where a woman stops the car at a light or at the gas station and a person casually opens their passenger door and grabs their purse from the seat and takes off running. The lock is there, I use it.