Deeply rooted institutional and cultural discrimination can only exist if discriminating behavior is acceptable when it done against the right target. Changing which demographic is permitted to discriminate (and hate) against only changes the smallest amount of variable, which is the opposite strategy of going deeper in the effort to eliminate discrimination.
It is very similar to violence. People abhor violence when it done against the wrong person and love violence when it feel justified against the right target. This is why laws regulating violence is often written to be as broad as possible. If you give people the right to turn to violence when they feel its justified, you get mob justice which only create spirals of more violence.
When people feel extreme inequalities persist even when laws should prevent them, people reach for mob justice. Riots, occupations of buildings, looting and shooting. The result is rarely that the extreme inequalities goes away. The cure is almost always the same, which is restricting violence even further and working directly at removing violence from institutional structures and culture.
To continue the steel manning, here's a thought experiment:
What if a large percentage of people decided to exclude you from everything for some arbitrary reason. Just you.
People know who you are and pass you up for jobs, promotions, home loans, value your contributions less, etc.
The reasons don't make sense. They're impervious to argument. In some cases people deny that they're doing it, or seem genuinely unaware, but they're doing it just the same.
To you. Only to you.
Nobody is initiating violence. Nobody is actively stealing from you or harming you. They're just boycotting you, excluding you, assuming the worst about you by default...
What would you do? How long would this have to go on for you to turn to violence if nothing else made any difference?
First off, I would define that as violence if it came to an extreme. Imprisoning people is to exclude people from everything, including space to move around. Society in general define that as violence. So following this thought experiment we must then enter the philosophical discussion to define what violence is.
Excluding people from everything in modern society causes harm. Starvation, exposure to the environment, psychological harm, atrophy of muscle and body. Excluding people from health care lead to further harm and eventually death. Taken to the extreme and we got murder.
If a majority of people voted to allow murder and violence then the most likely outcome is a civil war, but if in this thought experiment we are talking about only allowing murder and violence towards a single person, the best strategy would be to flee and seek asylum.
If we however limit this thought experiment to an degree which isn't murder and violence, and within the already set limits that government laws has specified (such as the European law of human rights), then if a large percentage of people decided to exclude me from a limited number of things, the best approach would be to political active to make the law even better while at the same time personally avoiding those people. No violence required. Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent resistance is a good model when laws are unjust and need changing.
It is very similar to violence. People abhor violence when it done against the wrong person and love violence when it feel justified against the right target. This is why laws regulating violence is often written to be as broad as possible. If you give people the right to turn to violence when they feel its justified, you get mob justice which only create spirals of more violence.
When people feel extreme inequalities persist even when laws should prevent them, people reach for mob justice. Riots, occupations of buildings, looting and shooting. The result is rarely that the extreme inequalities goes away. The cure is almost always the same, which is restricting violence even further and working directly at removing violence from institutional structures and culture.