When women riders and drivers told us they wanted more control over how they ride and earn, we listened. That feedback led to Women Preferences, features designed to give women the choice to ride with other women. Since our first pilots last summer, we’ve heard just how much that choice matters—from feeling more comfortable in the back seat to more confident behind the wheel.
So the only way it could hurt anyone is if they’re a minority. Yes, that’s exactly why we have the Civil Rights Act and why what you’re suggesting is illegal.
Next you’re going to tell me that black people in racist towns should just eat at home if restaurants don’t want to serve them. And if the bus driver makes you sit at the back of the bus, just drive a car.
This is a bullshit legal category that exists primarily to exploit loopholes, but even that does not give anyone the right to discriminate and violate the Civil Rights Act.
Strictly speaking, if a driver cancelled every ride that a black person booked, they could be sued for it, although such a suit would be very difficult in practice because you’d have to have enough records of that driver (or the company, if that was the target of the suit) to show a consistent bias.
This is the case in every business. Denial of service based on protected classes is illegal.
The difference in what I am saying and what you are saying is scale and you are completely ignoring the rest of my argument. The scale at which you would have to be a minority for this to impact you significantly is somewhere in the 1-5% range (as in your minority is only this percentage of the local population) with the assumption that the other 95-99% are opposed to you. This is why Uber providing this as an option is different from the cases which the Civil Rights Act was based around. Hell, this is why scabs are effective against unions as well.
A diner not serving black people is impactful because a handful of people are the business owners and are effectively gating you out. Uber allowing those people to select only a specific preference means that anyone who doesn’t set restrictions will break that system and actually benefit from it (more business).
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.
OK, so you need to reach a threshold of 5% of the population before you’re allowed to have rights, got it.
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.
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.
Because it isn’t! The scenario you described is literally the exact sort of thing the Civil Rights Act exists to stop! You are literally advocating for allowing denial of service based on protected classes!
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.