This is technically true, which is the best kind of true. Swap in nationalist, chauvinist. It's utterly clear what was meant by racism above, in spite of your semantics.
I want to write and name a macro after you! Anytime I want, I can just append -obe or -ist to any word in any document I'm writing...regardless of context or meaning! As a bonus, it will recognize file-extension-neutral files (all 822 of them!).
Yes we understand, racist is the liberal catch all for anyone you disagree with. The problem is that it dilutes the value of the word, so when someone deserves to be called racist, it people don't know if they really are racist, or are just opposed to outsourcing jobs.
Racist is the laziest argument ever and it's diluting the word. If people were more accurate about describing problems, their criticisms wouldn't be dismissed to easily.
A perfect example is Donald Trump. Every argument about Trump became "he's a racist!!11", which caused people to ignore and focus on the wrong problems with him! There was a lot of negatives to Trump, and yet everyone just said "Racist, boom I don't need to argue any more!"
People started ignoring completely legit arguments because the racist angle was so overplayed. I'm sick of hearing racist as the end-all be-all argument. It doesn't work anymore, the card is overplayed. The only place it still works is in liberal bubbles. (Note I'm socially liberal, fiscal conservative moderate, no dog in this race)
That's true. That's why there's also the umbrella term, "bigoted", when referring to bias stemming from ignorant prejudice. The watering down of "racist" to equal all forms of bigot is indeed a problem, and you have brought up a valid concern.