Can someone explain to me the need to be represented?

Fair enough. I've definitely experienced the same "white guilt trip". Some idiot hung a noose on a statue my Freshman year of college. The whole thing got blown out of proportion and received a lot of media attention as a hate crime. The statue in question was of a white man and was only mildly racist for his time. Suddenly the entire campus had a "culture of discrimination" and the black student union issued a serious of ludicrous demands including building a building for a "black safe zone". I was basically crucified for pointing out that blacks were actually over represented on campus proportional to the state population and that no other minority group was using media attention to demand multi-million dollar construction projects. I follow the numbers. Sometimes a group of people get a really pineappleing short end of the stick.

I like to think I'm a rational, enlightened person that doesn't discriminate (as much as humanly possible) and thus not part of the problem. It's really not about malicious intent. I really doubt many people actually realize and intend to be racist or discriminate.

You're preaching the choir, but the reality is for some of these groups the discrimination is just as important! The Mexican immigrant that gets turned down for a job could have been the doctor who cured cancer. The Chinese immigrant that has to get higher grades to get into college than his white neighbor might have solved our energy crisis. Fighting discrimination in an effective way produces a merit based society which better enables us to fight all those problems and future ones we can't even thought of yet! I feel like the media attention which focuses on and enhances false or minor issues in order to sensationalize news into entertainment is the real culprit. It obscures the genuine problems in a sea of others then one is inevitably proved fallacious and the entire house of cards falls. Every canvas is painted with the same brush. People just keep watching the "news" and clicking the bait which pays the bills so the cycle continues to grow.

I think the problem with both lines of thinking is there are so many factors involved for both circumstances, that claiming it's some "gender/racial" hurdle is so 1 dimensional that it's frankly disingenuous to begin a conversation like that.

The most fascinating thing right now, like, seriously I would never have guessed this like 3 years ago, but conservatives have found a common enemy with liberals regarding this PC police nonsense. With people, like Milo yiannopolis, an openly gay sassy mother pineappleer, literally being the front runner right now of the conservative party over in Europe is just, mind blowing to someone like me. The common thread you are start to see if you look closely is the conservative movement has always been seen as Anti science, abortion, global warming, gay marriage, it was all systematically rejected because of mainly 'faith'.

Now we see this way of what is being seen as the 'regressive left', which are anti science themselves, which is why you're seeing such a sudden jump in people like me, who encouraged gay marriage, but are stepping back from these same people who are 'on a roll'. It's obnoxious because you see these brats who essentially are so nearsighted they can't see the consequences of witch hunts based on opinions that people should, in our country at least, have the freedom to have. When Chick Filet funded anti organization groups who actively tried to sabotage the movement, my first and only action against them, is quit business with them. I didn't demand the president get fired, I didn't try to torch the place down, I didn't attack employees.

Yet at UMBC I can be minding my own business in a library and get shrieked at with no consequence because I'm not acknowledging some protest that has been concocted by bored, entitled trust fund baby brats who are upset that the adjective 'poor' is still being used in today's vocabulary.

EDIT: I mean when you have the president echoing "wage gap" myth, it's just disappointing to say the least