I don't deny they exist, but they have been marginalized in society. They don't hold any significant power in terms of holding people back.
And... unless you're in a marginalized minority group, you really aren't in a position to know how racist people are.
Oh yeah, I just remembered, we also recently had a president for four years who was overly racist. Remember his attacks on Judge Curiel? Remember Mexicans "are rapists"?
So yes you’re right anyone can empathize. But I don’t think that’s what OP is saying. You really cannot fully understand unless you live it. Just like you cannot understand true poverty in African countries, when you’ve spent your whole life living in a (relatively) rich one.
But I (a black African man) can never truly know or experience what the average Uyghur goes though day to day, because I just haven’t lived it.
So no, when we say that, we are not “excluding” anyone - in fact the more allies a minority has, the more likely they will achieve equality. But lived experience is different.
However lived experience can also introduces biases — for instance, would you trust a court of law to deliver justice if the victim was also judge and jury? That lived experience which provides sensitivity and also can make one too close to the matter at hand to see things clearly.
I think people with and without lived experiences can pull together and make positive contributions.
I say this because there are so many examples of solutions proposed by people with lived experience that are utterly counterproductive, because they shut out the voices of those without lived experience but who might have balancing views drawn from the broader human experience.
My experience is that people are more likely to share racist views with other people of their ethnic group but would likely never be overtly hostile to a person of a different race.
Also, I think if you are in a marginalized group it's extremely hard to disambiguate racism from general assholery.
If you don't get hired for a job you'll never know if it was because the interviewer was racist or because he just didn't like you
A great example was how shutting down travel at the start of Covid-19 was seen as racist. Yet, there should have been no issue as it was the only thing we can do in our global environment to slow the situation. Yet, the people in charge came up with that as racist.
"When Mexico sends its people, ... they're rapists." - Donald Trump
That time he said April Ryan (reporter) should "go set up the meeting" with the congressional black caucus for him.
Shithole countries.
The Muslim ban. Which for a while people around him tried to get him to pretend wasn't a Muslim ban, but really wanted to keep using those words, so he did.
I don't have any complaints about shutting down travel over COVID-19. It should have happened sooner, and I don't know anyone who ever disagreed with that. On the other hand, he did go out of his way to unneccessarily try and rename COVID the "China virus," which sure looked like racial scapegoating to me.
But, I would say that his mysogyny is much worse. And, his love for dictators. ("love" being his term)
Does this mean that it is not empirically measurable then? That would explain a lot because actual data is what I find missing from the claims of how prevalent racism is.
As for empirical data, there's tons. Maybe start with this Brookings report since it's on the topic of the OP (housing) https://www.brookings.edu/research/biased-appraisals-and-the...
"The question is: What explains this? We don’t know with any precision. In our paper, we reviewed literature on racial bias and pointed to its potential as an explanation, writing: “Our findings are generally consistent with the widespread presence of anti-Black bias.” We left it for future work to explore some of the relevant mechanisms that link bias to valuations and quantify their importance."
So the thought is that it MIGHT be bias (a bit presumptuous then to title the study "Biased appraisals..."). And we are waiting on future studies to actually provide the causal link.
But even if every bit of the 23% delta is caused by racial bias, we need to consider the trend. As far as I can tell every important sociological data point on this matter (employment, wealth, marriage, laws, etc.) has been improving decade after decade. I don't know what numbers this same study, or one equivalent to it, would reveal from say 5 or 7 decades ago, but I assume it would have been substantially worse.
All of which is to say that proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse does not seem to be supported by the data. To the contrary, it would seem that it is less than it's ever been and continues to decline.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not suggesting you or anyone here is proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse. But I think it's safe to say that proposal is prevalent in pop culture.
I'm not familiar with a narrative that racism is getting worse. My impression (and I thought this was in line with US liberal thinking) is that we are now beginning to admit that racism didn't go away with the end of slavery, it didn't go away with the end of segregation; it's still here. I'd say things are getting better, because many white people acknowledge racism instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
But it is already bad enough that Afroamericans had been kept from acquiring wealth by various means, judicial and extrajudicial for much of the last century. They are closing the wealth gap, but extremely slowly.
Ignoring that history is part of a basically racist system.