Nah, it’s my bad. TroutMan is right… I shouldn’t have said ‘the left’. That’s not fair, or accurate. I should have said “some activists on the left”.
Because maybe it’s not racism? For example, I think some here would consider opposition to affirmative action to be racist.
If I want to complain about lowering standards for minority applicants, that’s likely to get me tagged a racist by some.
If I say that a big part of the problem in the Black community in inner cities is that they have adopted values and behaviours that don’t work for them (perhaps because we built the incentives that caused it), that could be an honest belief with the intent of trying to help those communities, but that still won’t stop someone from accusing me of racism, because maybe in their social circles it’s accepted that questioning ANY reasons for Black under-performance other than ‘structural racism’ or ‘white privilege’ is evidence of racist thinking - especially if they kmow I am on the ‘right’, because they have pre-judged peoole on the right to be racist almost by default.
On the other side, I actually think lowering standards for minorities IS racist, but I wouldn’t call someone who advocates for it a racist, because they likely don’t see it that way at all. They may have other reasons for supporting it that I haven’t considered, or we may just disagree. Most people on the right think that CRT is a horribly racist philosophy, but the left disagrees.
An example from a less contentious issue: I was taken to task some time ago for using the word ‘Democrat’ instead of ‘Democratic’ (as in, ‘The Democrat Party’) I totally didn’t get it, and neither did lots of people. We split down the middle between people who said, "oh yeah, that’s an obvious slur’, and half who responded essentually ‘huh?’ Apparently, ‘Democrat’ is used by some to mean ‘DemocRAT’ or something. But only a portion of the members even knew that was a thing, while others were bewildered. But it was assumed that since I am on the ‘right’ I intended it as a malicious slur.
Another example is calling someone a racist for not capitalizing ‘Black’. While I am sure there are racists out there who intentionally use lower case ‘black’ out of spite or something, there are a lot more who simply don’t pay much attention to the latest trends in left-wing spelling and punctuation rules, and don’t read the kinds of sites that would make an issue out of it, so simply have no clue that it’s even a thing. People who immerse themselves in anti-racist doctrine and such may think it’s obvious, but others may just not even see the issue.