Not Racist

I had a short but uncomfortable conversation with a former neighbor recently about the George Zimmerman verdict. His position was that Trayvon Martin would have been an immediate danger to me, so we are better off without him. The very next words out of his mouth were, "But I'm not a racist because I have black friends."

I need to find a word or phrase to describe what he said there. Logical fallacy? Syllogist fallacy? Ah, fallacy of the undistributed middle and fallacy of composition (with its compatriots hasty generalization and false analogy) are getting closer. Or some other fallacy? Inductive reasoning gives evidence, not proof, of the conclusion, and gets weaker when you add cognitive bias (like bias blind spot and introspection illusion). Just because you like specific example of category doesn't mean that you don't discriminate against general category, knowingly or unknowingly. Given our lame national culture, you really should assume otherwise.

I have many more examples of this behavior, so it's prevalent. If we're discussing broad topic (like racism), how does something else (like the race of a few of your friends) prove that you're free of the typical cultural bias of normative behavior (like discrimination)?

It's very frustrating. But I'd feel a little less frustrated if I could just shoot back, "Bah! Logical fallacy! False analogy!" or similar. Don't try that nonsense on me because I see the large holes making your argument look weak and tattered. And I don't think that's just naïve cynicism on my part.

UPDATE: LinkedIn apologizes for assuming beautiful women can't also be engineers. Does this mean LinkedIn would not have to apologize if the woman in the picture weren't an engineer? If so, they missed the point. How she looks in a photo does not influence how she does her job or what her job is!