PJ Media: "How 'Woke' Social Conditioning Almost Cost My Friend His Life ..."

I've mentioned before that because black males have a much, much greater propensity to commit violent crime, one should exercise a correspondingly greater care and avoidance when around them. It may seem unfair since we ideally base our judgment of a person on the individual rather than broad generalizations; but in this case, the statistics are so skewed that you are much better off applying the broad generalization until you have evidence to the contrary.

    Case in point is the article "How 'Woke' Social Conditioning Almost Cost My Friend His Life and Is Killing Our Nation" by Kevin Downey Jr. at PJ Media. Downey relates:

    A friend I'll call Tom, a gay man who is as liberal as they come in New York City, was walking along West 42nd St., approaching 10th Ave., around midnight. The bright lights of Times Square and the relative safety they offered were blocks behind him. He was in a notoriously dodgy neighborhood called Hell's Kitchen where the further west one goes, the more dangerous the neighborhood becomes. 

* * *

    When Tom got to the corner of W. 42nd and 10th, he saw what he described to me as a "scary-looking black man" across the street. Tom's instincts told him to cross the street and play it safe. But Tom is a woke gay man in NYC, not a racist peckerwood redneck, and he was sickened by what he referred to as his "inner racism." Determined to prove to himself he wasn't a bigot, Tom crossed 10th Ave. and walked toward the man.

* * *

    Nothing happened until Tom got to a darker part of the block. Then the man that his instincts had warned him about — instincts his woke social conditioning deemed "racist" and told him to ignore — maneuvered in front of Tom and placed a revolver to my friend's head.

    "Give me your wallet, f****t," the man commanded. 

    Tom froze. That shouldn't have been happening. He was a good liberal who didn't pass judgment on a threatening person simply because of the man's skin color. After all, black and gay people are both victims of "white privilege." Shouldn't they be buddies, sipping appletinis at the Stonewall Inn?

    Tom handed the man his wallet and went to find a bathroom, which was no easy task in New York City.

This is also a good example of the principle described in the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker that our more "primeval" brain is much better at recognizing danger signals than the more logical portion of a our brain, and so we should trust our gut instincts when it starts to send us danger signals.