When the preference is strong enough that it affects hiring decisions
That's only legal when people discriminate against whites
whether you're even welcome in the restaurant at all
When does that happen? Can you show me the business that decides they don't want money?
whether people think it's safe to have you living on the same street
People have the right to prioritize their own safety. You have to look at why the phenomenon of "white flight" exists before you judge it to be wrong and then come up with some way that you don't allow people to make personal choices to benefit their family.
the perceptions of a jury, etc. it does translate into an advantage, privilege, asset or whatever we want to call it.
I think it comes down to a general recognition by a group in the ultimate value to individuals of everyone complying with laws and rules. If society is law abiding, then everyone benefits, so there is more condemnation and judgement against it. It doesn't require a huge shift for people, pattern recognition machines, to notice and then make judgements based on that pattern.
People are people and they all have preferences. A great many people (apparently) don't seem to understand when the preference crosses the line into a prejudice.
For personal choices, you can be as prejudice as you want. It's how you protect yourself and your family. Maybe the guy in the alley-way with the meat cleaver is just a butcher on his way home from work and a really nice guy, maybe you wouldn't want to take that risk and make a prejudicial judgement on his character based on his outward appearance.
Where it's wrong is when government and large institutions do it.
There was a recent article in Scientific American, authored by twelve medical professionals which explained how initial reports of George Floyd's autopsy misused medical terms to make the police appear less culpable.
In todays world, you can get 12 politicized people to tell you anything you want.
Look at how many people not only bought into it, but embellished it further, to the point where it morphed into the claim that Floyd was in a drug fueled rage which left the police no choice.
We still haven't seen the body cameras or other footage. Maybe they are being saved for trial, they may change people's view of what happened or they may reinforce them. Who knows until we've seen them - most things are just theories based on how people often behave when taking certain drugs.
I'm not saying this was necessarily racial prejudice, as there are people who will reflexively defend the police no matter what they do. But either way, it is still food for thought.
I would tend to defend the police, because there are way way more cases of the police doing and being right than there are situations like this. I've seen the "hands up don't shoot" story now so many times and it so often turns out to be BS. It doesn't mean there aren't cases where the police have done wrong. Some of these should result in prosecution, some are just the inevitable consequence of the law of averages when humans are involved in millions of interactions and mistakes are inevitable.
A system that demands perfection will never get it and attempts at perfection will result in a possibly way worse system.
Make policing too impossible and only fools will do it. Policing will then become worse.
Make policing too impossible and it's effectiveness is undermined, so crime explodes.
Some number of wrongful deaths are inevitable, but not every wrongful deaths equates to malice and intent.
