So a little inside baseball about this. Everyone stereotypes, everyone has or will have racist thoughts at some point. What matters is what you do, and how you meaningfully atone (not perform atonement). Someone going around being like “I’m not racist” or “how dare you call me racist” what they are really doing is just identifying themselves as “not getting it”

What they are not getting is there is still work to do. That’s all. So I am unconcerned with people being hurt by the ugly word “racism” like I am unconcerned with when my kids say me telling them to cleaning their room (or whatever) isn’t fair. It’s not that I don’t know how to clean a room, or that I have a need to force them. It’s ultimately they’ll benefit from knowing how to do the work, and they are just saying “I don’t get that this is something I need to ultimately do to grow, for my benefit”

Lots of people who “get it” are called racist and their internal response is “well, ok. Probably not but hey, let’s listen and see why I make someone feel that way. Maybe I need to adjust how I am doing things here”

It’s a sort of “no one who is king has to announce they are king” kind of thing.

Even less so if we are saying maybe the way things are built benefits me more than my neighbor. It’s a weird hill to die on to be like “I am personally offended that you think this big collection of people I am not the boss of, maybe set things up unfairly before I was an adult.”

I’m a middle age white male btw. I’ll have to work a bit to give you more examples of systemic racism, but man could I give you examples of banks falling over to give me mortgages and instances of me getting way too much deference at work.