[nagvx]

I generally agree with your idea that "don't be an asshole" is an incredibly subjective and unhelpful rule of thumb. However your comment that "being racist is pretty easy to nip in the bud" is just absurdly oversimplified.

A racist may live in fear of the criminality of (insert race here) without seeing the bigger picture of poverty that causes it. A racist may have a majority of bad experiences with (insert race here) without realising their own prejudice was to blame.

Racism isn't "being mean", racism is potentially diverse set of prejudices and overly broad opinions that are founded on faulty logic or incomplete data. Racism can be propped up by an entire web of social beliefs and a lifetime of personal experience. Racists don't think they're "being mean", they think they hold sane, justifiable opinions against other "mean" or even "inferior" groups of people. Indeed, it may "not even occur to them they are being offensive".

The long and sordid history of racism around the globe can attest to the fact that racism is not something "easy to nip in the bud".

[tw04]

Stopping someone from fearing someone of a different race isn't easy. Stopping blatant racism in the workplace is. I think it's a bit of a stretch for you to assume I was talking about "eradicating racism from planet earth" when the context of the discussion was interacting with coworkers. CLEARLY when I said "nipping it in the bud is easy" I wasn't referring to the end of racism across the planet. That will LITERALLY be impossible until the point we have a unified culture globally: which I won't say will NEVER happen, but we're generations away if it ever does.

[nagvx]

I wasn't assuming you were talking about "eradicating racism from planet earth" - that's a bit of a strawman. "Stopping blatant racism" is moving the goalposts, because "blatant" wasn't part of the original context.

As you say, you can stop someone overtly declaring their racism, but that doesn't mean they won't still covertly (or even unconsciously) continue with racist behaviors. Which is why it isn't so "clear", because even a simple situation with coworkers, you can be facing an uphill battle.

Anyway, I would wager we both broadly agree and this is now just a semantic argument.