A really important thing to understand about bigotry, how a community responds to it, and why they're not spotting the bad vibes that are obvious to you:

The vast, vast majority of people do not actually *understand* bigotry, as a mechanic. They've been taught about "discrimination" as a list of things you cannot say or do, and a list of groups/people to whom you cannot say or do them. The 'protected class' thing, basically.

Nobody has ever really taught them how bigotry *works*, what its consequences are, or how it is experienced by the targets on the other end. They themselves, even with the best intentions, don't actually understand it - they are just following a vague ruleset given to them, because somebody told them to.

(This is likely where the "I can't say anything anymore!" thing comes from, especially in centrist circles. It's frustration that the full ruleset is not known to them, and it feels to them like it is expanding outside of their view.)

That means that they literally *cannot* recognize any form of bigotry that isn't on their 'list'. They don't know about the patterns of behaviour or the social dynamics at all.

They simply don't recognize it when patterns of bigotry are applied towards groups not on their list - say, furries, or users of a particular programming language. They only have the list, it's not on there, therefore it can't be bigotry or discrimination! Even if the consequences are the same in practice.

This can only be fixed by actually teaching people how bigotry *works*, and talking about real-world consequences, including the indirect ones, and how things got to that point, and showing that it is generically applicable - it's the *behaviour and attitude* that matters, not the specific words.

Real-world examples help a lot here, especially for the cases where the cause and effect are a few steps removed from each other, because most people *also* aren't used to thinking about second-order effects.