[jrm4]

Primarily because my way is more forward looking and gets better results in the future, which is more important than punishing the past.

As I said before, I'm not here to smoke out old (or even current) racists individually. I don't think it's a valuable practice to "witch hunt" (even when the "witches" in this case are absolutely real and do exist.)

Because what that ends up doing is: every e.g. white person who's never said the n-word, or who has black people in their family, or has one black friend etc etc etc now subconsciously but completely lets themselves off the hook in any way. They get to think of themselves as superior because we've now defined racism as essentially a binary.

The above situation is mentally easier for many people (perhaps you as well) to deal with, rather than considering how deep this all goes.

Look, one wild thing you realize as a black person is that nearly everybody everywhere is to some extent surrounded by racism is that most everybody has some of it subconsciously internalized, and you don't fix it until you think about it directly, in yourself and others. I'm not a huge fan of "oh everybody's a little racist" because whoever says it is usually doing something dumb like excusing behavior -- but it's FAR closer to the truth than "if we smoke out the hidden but self-consciously racist people all will be fixed."

(so I suppose I'm saying -- yes, pay attention to what you are suggesting we pay attention to -- but also understand that it is almost CERTAINLY nowhere near sufficient to fix the problem.)