> From what I can see, the proposed solution to "institutional racism" is to browbeat everybody into thinking nicer thoughts.
That has never been the fix for institutional racism; the whole point of efforts to get people to recognize racism as an institutional problem rather than a mere personal one is so that the institutional problems which maintain it can be attacked. If you make the above claim sincerely, then you seriously have been paying approximately zero attention to anyone addressing institutional racism ever.
> But we've been trying that for decades
Whether what you describe or the actual fixes pushed by people advocating to address institutional racism in law enforcement, no, we mostly haven’t. We've mostly been backing the institutions charged with institutional racism, and not trying anything, which is why a movement that has spent most of the time up until the eruption in support in the wake of George Floyd’s murder marginalized even on the Left has grown up trying to get people motivated to have ant concern at all for the issue.
I mean, there were the Obama-era federal investigations that were ostentatiously discontinued by the incoming Trump Administration (which definitely fall into the driving institutional reform, not thinking nicer thoughts, camp), but not a lot else.
> Whereas, the solution for institutional corruption is to change the structure of the institutions
That's what the people talking about institutional racism have been saying since they started talking about it; that is like the entire import of the modifier “institutional”: that the source and, therefore, the solution is in the structure of institutions.