And if not, what might it be about this sub-group of people that will never ever "get it" - what's different about them that they simply can't?
I like to think that I am rational, but I still double check myself to make sure I'm not being sexist. Occasionally minor sexist behaviour or thinking still creeps in...
I'm not sure if delusional is the right term - small minded might fit the bill a little better. So if it's due to mental laziness or an inherent dearth of mental ability, perhaps bigotry is difficult to abate without laws to protect minorities.
Nonetheless you ask a good question - with time and exposure can we eliminate bigotry? I hope so. But it's easy to invent new targets for ridicule: Emos, Hipsters, Rockabillies etc. They're not exactly unprivileged minorities, but it shows how easy it is to disparage someone because of their appearance and cultural differences.
I think all of human history shows your hope to be misplaced.
"In sufficient time," perhaps. In the meantime, millions of people are marginalized, exploited, abused, and killed. Those are real human beings, not just statistical stairsteps to Utopia, and I'd prefer to let them have freedom and equality now rather than reserving it for their great-great-great-grandchildren.
What evidence do you have that humans would reach this lollipop level of appreciation and understanding, even in geologic time? Genocides occur even today between peoples for reasons that many even educated people have difficulty deciphering. As well, go look at the comments on YouTube and see if humanity is advanced. I mean really ...
The reason I asked that particular question (and I guess I didn't do a good job of it), and used the word "delusional", is because I personally think there are in many cases vast differences between sub-groups, and these differences are of varying incompatibility. Many of them are imagined (false stereotypes), but many are not, and I also find it naive, this idea that all we have to do is pass some laws to force integration and then suddenly everyone is going to see the hateful errors of their past ways.
As you correctly point out, there is a lot more in history to suggest we cannot "all just get along" than there is to support a unified utopia. Also, in politically correct forums such as these where most participants have a much less diverse background than they'd like to think, there seems to be this pervasive idea that the fault lies all on one side. Listen to some rap music, or go visit one of the more extremist feminist forums, or an atheist forum, where the participants really speak their minds, and you'll see there is plenty of irrational bigoted hatred everywhere, not just from the privileged white male.
To me, the idea that you can solve a problem when you insist on being ignorant of many aspects of it is rather foolish.
Then why is the WSJ article titled "Workplace Equality Is Good For Business?" Shouldn't it be titled "Workplace Equality Is Good, But We Need To Force Businesses To Do It By Law"?
It is possible for something to be good for business, but for the free market to not choose it. The free market, after all, is simply a collection of human participants, none of whom are perfectly informed nor perfectly rational.
There seems to be a weird belief in some circles that the free market tends to arrive naturally upon a globally optimal solution.
There is a much more widespread weird belief that governments can do so, even though the track record of governments is worse than the track record of free markets.
Which seems to jive with the notion that neither a monolithically planned, nor entirely laissez-faire system, are likely to produce optimal results.
No, the most popular notion in the western world is a nominal "free market" with massive regulation. For example, here are the rules that a "free market" business in the US has to abide by:
https://www.federalregister.gov/
Note that this is a daily journal: in other words, the "current issue" is just the rules that got issued today.
Not to mention that we have central control of the financial system (the Fed and other countries' central banks), education (in the US there is at least some control still at the local level, other developed countries control everything at the state or national level), and trade--here, for example, is the current list of US tariffs:
Business is moderately regulated in the US, especially compared to other industrialized societies. The mere existence of a large number of rules doesn't mean that the regulation is onerous.
So if you're a small business, it's not "onerous" to have to look through myriads of rules to make sure you aren't violating one? To the extent that these regulations are not "onerous", it's because they're ignored, not because they actually work.
How good would the article be if we were in a time that people may freely be as racist as they want and there were not any social stigmas in the majority about being racist and such racism was commonplace? You would have widespread discrimination and your silly little wouldn't solve anything about it. For those playing at home, this was the status quo in the US at one point. You may argue, as libertarians may, that this is all perfectly fine and is the "moral" way but as usual, with your view of "freedom" we would not have a world many would want to live in.
No, the article that started this thread was from the WSJ, and I was asking a question about it, not endorsing it. Please read before knee-jerk reacting.
It turns out "Military Integration" => "Less racist military", for instance, rather than the other way around.
So yeah, "Force Businesses to Do it by Law" is unfortunately the necessary step