Maybe it will indeed be really hard to recover. Then again, my determination just got reinforced.
Did I engage in introspection the first time I was called racist in this context? Yes, of course. 10th time? I don't think so.
The danger here, of course, is that having stopped outside sparked introspection after the message became perceived as a "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat worms!" one, I of course may have drifted into it.
Almost certainly a bigger factor in the US is that this has been used to divide us for political gain, and now that we've become an polity where identity rules, it's anti-survival to continue to play by the old no longer operative rules. For a degree of automatic discrimination against other identities who are in direct, existential competition with me as a white, heterosexual male is a requirement if I want me and mine to survive the next few decades.
Call it racism (except, of course, We Don't Care), call it realism, those facts on the ground have to changed before movement towards your ideals can be realized in the US.