Not being racist seems to be an awfully hard adjustment for some people. Don't worry, a generation or two will die off and it won't seem quite so onerous.
But they were raised with the belief that racism was due to prejudice. To them, racism is judging someone by their skin color / background rather than the actions of that individual.
They don't buy into the idea of microaggressions and implicit bias. To many nowadays that makes them racist individuals. To me that begs the question, what behavior today might be seen as racist decades from now?
The self-interest: The Portuguese had to justify their pioneering slave trade of African people before the pope.
The racist idea: Africans are barbarians. If we remove them from Africa and enslave them, they could be civilized.
"We can understand this very simply with slavery. I’m enslaving people because I want to make money. Abolitionists are resisting me, so I’m going to convince Americans that these people should be enslaved because they’re black, and then people will start believing those ideas: that these people are so barbaric, that they need to be enslaved, or that they are so childlike that they need to be enslaved.”
https://theundefeated.com/features/ibram-kendi-leading-schol...
We're not going to get it 100% right, or find 100% of the situations where we're screwing it up, or even come up with the right solutions right away, but it's too often that conservatives simply want to throw their hands up and either downplay or outright ignore the problem in order to say it's not solvable or not worth solving. That's just cowardice, and we can do better.
I'd rather have imperfect progress than no progress.
Progress for the sake of progress is not progress. The fact that there is a problem doesn't mean that someone has to do something when there's nothing productive to be done.
People are apparently unaware that we are living in an unprecedented globalist diversity experiment, and there's no reason to believe that forcing disparate cultures to live in such close proximity to each other will end positively. In fact history has repeatedly shown the opposite.
In our current moment, it's progress for the sake of not letting police get away with murder.
What part of the unprecedented peace we find ourselves in makes you uncomfortable?
- Conservatives at every step of the way as the rest of us have been busy correcting society's worst injustices
I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of conservatism. My perception is that conservatives disagree with me over the problem set, not the idea that we should solve problems.
If I'm being honest, most of the conservatives I've talked to seem more interested in undermining progress because it's coming from the other side of the aisle, or because it implies that government should have a hand in helping it along.
Some of us believe that the answer to a world which is chock full of scary things beyond our control is to learn to live internally without fear, not to impose our personal delicate sensibilities on upon others. This isn't cowardice and this kind of shaming only turns moderates away from your cause. Furthermore nonsense like microaggressions are effectively a form of thought control and when whiteness is treated as some original sin together with a completely subjective system of rules you have a social structure which is effectively designed to be abused for the transfer of power, while ostensibly claiming to be a champion of equality.
Are you really surprised that people turn away from an ideology which treats them as though they owe the world something, or need to change their behavior, for the color of their skin? We used to call that racism. Now it's increasingly normalized and shoved in our faces if we want corporate work. Frankly, people are tired of the bullshit and I'm worried about how far the pendulum is going to swing back.
Change is uncomfortable but necessary.