provide examples of what is wrong, like Catbus did, and what we can do to solve it. It would be a lot less frustrating and a lot more productive.
I agree with this, provide examples. People want to say that I’m clueless about this because I am white. So provide examples to this clueless white guy and then maybe I won’t be so clueless anymore. Show more than just some stats.
Here’s an example of “not invisible but successfully explained away by bullshit reasoning” that went on (still going on?) for decades because people don’t ask questions:
Firefighters often had (and still have?) a men-only club. The BS reasoning? The average man has more upper body strength that the average woman, the job requires carrying very heavy gear, so we only accept men. Your average observer will check whether the facts presented are true, stamp the excuse as okey-dokey, and move on.
The problem? Well, if the job requirement is that you have to be able to carry X pounds of gear up Y flights of stairs and move quickly carrying that load for Z minutes, that seems like a really easy sort of thing to simply test outright without having to throw out applicants because you suspect they couldn’t do it, right? And now that’s what some firefighters do, and lookee here it turns out some women can do the job just fine after all.
The thing is that the invisibility of institutional racism/sexism doesn’t usually withstand that much scrutiny. But most of us get through life without carefully scrutinizing everything we encounter–how could we? Who has that kind of time? So we don’t notice things unless they specifically trip us up. Which is why it always seems to fall on minority groups to fix this stuff, and it pays to listen when someone gets up the nerve to complain about it.