@ucbalumnus so when you make the claim “less bigotry meant that fewer people were offended”, are you saying that there was less bigotry 20 years ago in general, or less bigotry 20 years ago for certain groups. If your argument is just that in the past 20 years? different groups have become larger targets of bigotry while other groups have become smaller targets, that makes sense, but isn’t really responsive since I was speaking more on bigotry in the general sense.
Honestly, I don’t think that argument is necessarily hard to disprove, and I think racism has always had official backing, this also possibly depends on when you’re defining “before” as.