It’s an incremental effort that does not always pay off, but anything bigger, more sudden and especially anything hostile, always fails.
I feel like on some level the bigot knows that all they’re doing is being a bully, but it’s so much easier and comforting to be a bully than to be honest with themselves or examine themselves that they’ve never exercised that muscle.
So anything more than incremental support for a bully to be more tolerant is interpreted as an attack and then they’re like okay so I have to change this so my perspective/sense-of-self can never be contradicted again.
I guess that’s it, that the goal is not to encourage them to be a different person, but rather to encourage them to be part of something new or unfamiliar: tolerance.