While not impossible, discussion on problems as they play out in practice rather than in theory (in theory we don't have racism after all), we tend to not have statistics or not the right statistics (we're not measuring the things that would show the issue). Then, the best way to be informed is first hand accounts, which white people naturally wont have. First hand accounts serve as a ground truth when statistics are insufficient, and as such, I don't see how you can have a very informed exchange without them. Now you may read up on those account, but far more often than not, I see white people point to the absence of racism in a statistic and take it as proof it does not exist, or is so uncommon it doesn't show up. That is the problem that is avoided when including (people who telling their) first hand accounts.
> I see white people point to the absence of racism in a statistic and take it as proof it does not exist
I agree, and often I see it the other way around, with statistics used as the basis to build a racist discourse. The classic example is prison population statistics, and the even more classic one is Lombroso.
Plus, it's not like white people don't rely on personal experience and prejudices. There are psychological mechanisms to isolate "otherness" out of people you witness as "bad", you will just use the easiest one to pinpoint. So if you witness a bad guy who is white but from another town, you'll form a prejudice against people from the other town; if the guy is black, the prejudice will "scale up" to skin tone. The only way to offset that problem is to ensure everyone in the room comes from significantly different experiences and can somehow balance them out.
In the legal sense I meant (it is not allowed). And very few people are intentionally of consciously discriminating. I wanted to contrast that to practice: human features that gatekeep people of color and so on. Hope its clear now.
Today's twitter row is the "cancellation" of a history broadcaster for using the phrase "so many damn blacks" in a video, which is probably not a criminal offence Mark Meechan notwithstanding, but is definitely unambiguously racism.
Employment discrimination and the set of things covered by equalities law is the _beginning_ of tackling racism, not the end.
