Sorry, what do you mean? I am saying that it's a strawman argument to refer back to humanity's long history to indicate that changes in discrimination are happening really quickly, because change could only start happening in the last century or so, as discrimination was accepted thinking before that. How do I introduce my own strawman there?
If that works better for you, let's do this without the strawman bit: I don't think humanity's long history matters in this context, as discrimination was accepted thinking until just over a century ago. Change could have only happened since then, so its pace is not quick, it's quite slow. Plus there is a clear lack of 'walking the talk': if people in leading positions who disavow discrimination of any kind were serious about that, we'd see much more change. (A lot of change has to be forced to install a new normal in society - like requesting a certain percentage of women and men on board's of companies that are on stock exchanges.)
I think your following comments all belong together:
It looks to me like you think it's only discrimination if someone openly and knowingly discriminates. That's indeed fairly rare today (although
@JPRouve had a good point on support for openly racist parties). But I think that you are thus completely overlooking unconscious bias as a factor in society - while it is in fact a huge factor. It's the sort of thing that stops people from hiring women or non-white because 'the candidate doesn't feel right', 'maybe wouldn't fit the team as well', or 'doesn't give the right vibe from their CV'. Or it leads people to abandon career paths, because they keep receiving only lukewarm support from supervisor who 'don't really see it in them' and ask 'is this what you really want?' It's these vague statements where people can't quite put their finger on it, but something's off, and let's go with this other person.
That's why people seek different career paths; people of East-Asian origin are not naturally more predisposed to working in science and information technology, and black people are not naturally more athletic. (Genetically, this is impossible. Race is literally skin-deep, and no more. See
here, for example.) That doesn't mean that I think everybody is capable of the same things and should want the same things. But capability and career wishes now run along clear societal fault lines (gender, ethnicity, disability), and that makes no sense in terms of human genetics. (For if those fault lines are correct, you would have to assume genetic characteristics behind them.)
My impression, then, is that you would not count these dynamics as discrimination because they are unconscious (your 'dumb, ill-informed, ignorant people'). But this very much is discrimination, cause it results in discrimination. What else could we call it? Unfortunately, unconscious bias cannot always be proven very clearly and explicitly, and that's why statistics matter. If a social group is strongly present at one level and does not exist the next level up, it is possible that there is something practical that these people have just never learned; but that's rare. Unconscious bias (which does not just inform decisions from people hiring, but also societal pressures to do X and not Y) is the more likely factor. (I did a quick search; if you're curious here are some links on the
definition of unconscious bias,
some science and examples, and
how this can work out in the workplace.)
The thing is, though, that people are not born with these biases. They develop them because they exist in society, and so people 'grow into' them. That means that, if you don't do anything about it, unconscious biases would only disappear very slowly, as small percentages of each generation slowly wise up. But if change is imposed (quote for women, non-whites, etc.), it will be clear more quickly to more people that the unconscious bias is unfounded, and change can happen more quickly.
What are you on about? When I tried to have a discussion you ignored it.