Racism is in all our hearts — what’s important is in developing calm relations with your own strengths and weaknesses so that you can work on yourself if you choose.
Embracing this human weakness is part of developing the structures to keep us accountable.
Having internal prejudice which you wish to understand and eliminate, versus actively and purposely organizing or facilitating violence against people of color, are drastically different things. The long history I'm referencing is not people who have hidden prejudices and need to face their demons, it's people who are malicious toward groups of people for their race on purpose.
These are just different extremes in the expression of racism, which is the unjust treatment of other human beings due to race.
Those who are vehemently racist are likely only a minority of the expressions of racial injustice which minorities face as a lifestyle in America. The answer to both should point to structural solutions rather than making this an individual moral matter, asking people to monitor whether they're consciously racist.
> These are just different extremes in the expression of racism
No, they're not! One is quite obviously extreme, the other is quite obviously not. Some things are, and some things are not. Something that isn't can't be. I apologize for paraphrasing a disgusting piece of crap guy in this context, but... please understand that your nothing-matters philosophy is helping people get killed/the people killing them go without accountability.
Racism is not in our hearts - it's in our brains. A combination of in/out group bias, categorization error, inductive thinking and belief perserverance. Understanding these cognitive errors, and yes, that most decision making processes are made in our emotional centers, thus needing emotional intelligence training; this would all go a long way towards a more conscientious society.
These things can be taught directly. There is nothing special about it, and it's not about strengths or weaknesses. Most human brains work pretty similarly and have the same strengths and weaknesses, all of which can be managed or improved.