Laws play their role. Sometimes they walk fine lines between usefulness, uselessness and harmfulness, but they are not unequivocally useless in all such cases. Consider the gay awakening. When I was in high school the world was a qualitatively different place for homosexuals. A worse place.

The axis around which culture has pivoted on this and other issues, is difficult to name. But, an important part of it is just defining, explaining, defending (and sometimes even legislating) what is by our standards an asshole position. If you are so hung up on the idea that men are shagging each other in this world that it affects how you interact with people, you are an asshole. Society says so.

To this day, many non assholes are uncomfortable with gays. Maybe it's conservatism, cultural habit, latent homosexuality, whatever. But, if you're talking to an intelligent young person chances are they'll think of you as a crazy asshole if you start making fidgety mean statements about gays. That's the cultural change and it's a powerful force.

Legislation is a part of that. Perfectly enforceable or not, it allows an avenue for enforcement of blatant cases and formalizes the moral position of our time. Thou shall not be a crazy asshole that gets bent out of shape around the idea of a gay neighbor.

Legislation's role in this is sometime minor, sometimes major and sometimes ineffective. I have no illusions about what legislation can achieve without the winds of change at its back.

But, there is such a thing as our society.

We'd all like to think we're better. That's what leads us down the path of legislating out way out of prejudice. It's not a solution. To me, the article suggests an alternative way to fight it: information. Forget equal opportunity, affirmative action, whatever label you want to put on it. Publishing the data, putting a name with the prejudice on display for everyone to see, is the proper fight. Then the people who profit from the prejudice, and those who participate in the system, can be pressured to change. Failing that, society can marginalize them.

So while you may not change a particular person's mind, you stand a chance of changing their kid's mind. There was a time, not that long ago, in America where if you were Black and drank from the wrong water fountain our sat at the wrong spot in a restaurant, you would be killed by a mob.

Legislation about segregation changed that for the better. Probably not in those living in the day, but their kids and kid's kids.

Many people are routinely convicted/fined/sued for anti-discrimination laws. So clearly they won't "always be able to manufactor plausible deniability".

- basic right of owner to rent property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (and not to rent to anyone else...)

- basic right of hotel owner to accept anyone he choses (and deny access to anyone else)

- basic right of restarant manager to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)

- basic right of transportation owner to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)

- basic right of hospital operator to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)

Now pick your minority: it might have been Jews or the Slavic for the Nazis, it might have been the blacks in South Africa -- or the US, or homosexuals in Russia. Or the red-headed, the fat, the old, ...

Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace

Not really. You could define some as basic services and deny discrimination on those. Much like e.g. some basic utilities are already prohibited from cutting off supply to debtors while most businesses can.

I'm not saying I agree with not legislating equal treatment, but the slippery slope is not inevitable.

Based off of your opinions in this thread, I highly suggest that you never rent out your property. Your opinions on what the law says will likely end up with you in jail.

Likewise, if you own a shop, you cannot refuse entry to your property based on race/ethnicity. You do not have an absolute right to do whatever you want with your property.

Property rights aren't absolute. They certainly don't trump civil rights, and anti-discrimination laws are amongst the core of our civil rights laws.

You do not have "the right" to choose to not rent your property to someone. If you think it's one of your rights, and you're in the property market, you should talk to a lawyer.

You're quite free to believe it's not racist, and that the sky is purple, but the law has different ideas and will act accordingly.

PS a little thought experiment: you're renting an appartment and two people show up - one white and one black, with similar income, jobs and credit history. You have to pick one, so how can you prove your decision was not racist?

Numerous laws will look at an action and your thoughts to decide what crime you were convicted of (e.g. murder vs manslaughter, theft, intent to commit $CRIME, etc.)

You have to pick one, so how can you prove your decision was not racist?

Cripes, simple examples like that aren't what anti-racism laws are for. It's when 10 black people turn up and the landlord tells them the apartment is gone, but it isn't.

Laws against (say) homosexual sex, or norms/laws/rules mentioning homosexuality in schools/TV kept many homosexuals in the closet, hidden and powerless. I hope we can do the same for racism.

You don't need to change their deep thinking, necessarily. Just their behaviour. That starts the social change.

But I think a part of it comes down to a higher chance of young people with Arab names either being students (short-term, prone to be loud and messy no matter where they're from) or more likely to bring in additional residents. And most landlord's I've known would prefer if nobody would live at all in the apartment at all...

I don't think 25-year old "Hanz" would be the prime candidate for successes, try faking a 40-something with a job for BMW/Siemens (directly, no freelance/contract) who only needs it to sleep during the weekdays and drives home to his Stuttgart home for the weekends.

Of which there is a lot, too, of course. This is Munich, which has a much sadder 9th of November than Berlin.

It's protected alongside the statuses of disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation, to more-or-less the same extent in theory.

There are, however, glaring exceptions when it comes to housing (due to how this protection intersects with property rights), as housing agency industry groups, housing charities, and various other charities explain across the Internet.

Funnily enough, statistically men crash more than women too - but it's illegal to charge men more, because that would be gender discrimination. It's also illegal to charge someone more for insurance because they are black, christian, or a vegetarian - regardless of how many accidents members of those groups get into. And yet if you are 24, have been driving more than 6 years without an accident, you will still pay more than someone who is 25 and has passed their exam last week. If that is not discrimination then I have absolutely no idea what is.

We'll see what the EU do eventually - but I'm going to bet the UK either ignore it or find a loophole.

In the EU this became illegal recently. It also applied to women, who live longer than men, so were being charged higher life assurance. It just shows how anti-sexism laws can, and do, benefit men.

Renting out an apartment can lead to some very difficult situations (basically because the law isn't going to help you get out of them).

Everyone I know that rents out properties here in Belgium applies a very strict filter when selecting tenants; I would do the same and not feel bad about it for a second.

Yes. If you will not rent out your apartment to someone based on their ethnicity/race, that's illegal. If you don't like it, get out of the apartment rental business.

It's just so hard to prosecute people for it.

I believe I have read a study (can't dig it up) where a simple switch to a female name in the context of a technical job made the response rate drop.

I graduated with a BSME from Nebraska, and my first name is Earle. I went for ~3 months without any responses to resumes or applications, until I added my middle name. I started working a new job within two weeks, and now have to go by my middle name at work. All because "Earle from Nebraska" must be a redneck hick.

My case is almost certainly not racially motivated, but literally the only change I made was my name.

i'm an asian guy with an ultra generic anglo first and last name and i've never really had any trouble getting interviews. in fact when i show up and i'm asian they usually have a nice little chuckle and are pleasantly surprised. generally asians in technology at the worker-level don't get discriminated against unless they have thick accents (which i don't).

i've seen resumes with asian first/last names that have a note under the name that says "natural born US citizen, authorized to work anywhere in the US and territories" or something to that effect. it's a good thing, in my opinion. it signals multiple things in one neat little sentence.