No, they're not saying that. Although there's a bit of merit to the idea, and it's part of the justification for choice of groups protected by anti-discrimination laws.

Here's two more arguments:

- When such profiling is actually a contradiction of the traditional, racist stereotypes, it is far easier to believe that it's actually the result of learned experience, and therefore part of an honest attempt to be effective.

- It's far less of a burden to be confronted by "unusual" stereotyping. For practical reasons, because, say, one employer not hiring you because they don't like redheads is far less of a threat to your career than a significant number thinking your gender or skin color disqualify. And, more importantly, it will cause less psychological harm. To illustrate: I'm 6 feet tall; Once, for reasons I still don't understand, someone tried to insult me as being short. Such incongruities are more likely to cause bewilderment than anger or sadness.

Yeah, in a sociological level I totally understand how being discriminated for being black is more serious than being discriminated for something unlikely like being a redhead, but a major thing at play here is machine learning, should the engineers add code to the system in order for it to skip looking skins colors? What if skipping skin color is not enough and the machine "bypasses" such restrictions by detecting the shape of the nose (e.g. black people have slightly different noses than white people); at the end of the day what the machine is doing is just statistics and if you poke too many holes on it -for moral reasons or else- you may as well don't use statistics at all.

Were they seriously making fun of you for being short? It sounds more like a joke wherein they say/do something blatantly untrue. How absurd, to taunt an above-average-in-height man for being short.

Yes, it's legitimate to discriminate on behavior, including dress code.

As long as it's clearly stated and not applied selectively.

And why all the downvotes?