Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US
Objection@lemmy.ml 22 hours agoThe scale at which you would have to be a minority for this to impact you significantly is somewhere in the 1-5% range
OK, so you need to reach a threshold of 5% of the population before you’re allowed to have rights, got it.
with the assumption that the other 95-99% are opposed to you.
That assumption isn’t actually necessary.
Let’s say there’s a small town where 65% are non-racist (or less racist) whites, 30% are racist whites, and 5% are black. If your diner decides to serve that 5%, the 30% of racists will refuse to eat there, and you’ll end up losing a lot of customers. So, rather than “95-99%” needing to be opposed to you, it only needs to be the case that your population is outnumbered by the people who hate you - which is the case for many minority groups in many places in the country.
A diner not serving black people is impactful because a handful of people are the business owners and are effectively gating you out.
That’s not really true. If if was just a matter of a handful of business owners being racists, then those racist businesses would be out-competed by non-racist businesses that appeal to everyone. The problem was wider and more systemic, being welcoming to everyone would cause racists to boycott the business, so even if a business owner wasn’t racist themselves, they would be incentivized to ban the people who the racists hated.
This also goes both ways and is potentially international, Japanese could choose not to serve non-Japanese, a black person could choose not to serve white people for comfort or security.
You’re fundamentally not understanding why Uber allowing people to make this decision is not the same as 1960’s segregation.
Because it isn’t! The scenario you described is literally the exact sort of thing the Civil Rights Act exists to stop!
Knightfox@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
You’re just attacking me, not my argument
You skipped the whole counter argument (comparing to scabs and unions) that this lacks the social structure to support that behavior. If you tried to open a business that wasn’t racist then the racist people would come and threaten you, this isn’t happening with the Uber situation.
The thing is that Uber is not performing any discrimination, they are enabling other people to discriminate against each other and attempting to still provide service through it. Claiming that Uber is discriminating is functionally not true.
Objection@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
No, I’m pretty clearly attacking your argument. Your argument rests on this assumption that if allowing denial of service based on race only affects minorities <5% of the population, that that makes it acceptable somehow. It’s a horrible position but the fact that it reflects very poorly on you to voice it is beside the point.
Regardless, the Civil Rights Act applies to all businesses. It doesn’t matter if you think one particular business model makes the Civil Rights Act unnecessary - it is still the law. And opening up exceptions to it would set a dangerous precedent.
It doesn’t matter either way. “Discriminating” and “enabling discrimination” are both illegal. I have no idea why you’re so attached to this legal technicality of “contractors” that Uber uses to skirt labor laws, because it doesn’t even change anything here.