It’s hard to believe someone becomes racists merely from hearing that racism is banned.
The issue of hating billions of people is too serious to develop as a form of devil’s advocacy.
As for the issue of identity politics, I think that’s another discussion entirely.
Narrowly, I agree, but we all know that there's a lot of ideological baggage associated with "racism" as a term and specifically how it's brandied about and by whom. At this point, how you talk about racism signals a side in a culture war in which "both sides" are illiberal--and of course the inconvenient liberal center whose existence threatens both sides' dichotomous narratives ("yeah we're illiberal, but those guys are even more illiberal").
> The issue of hating billions of people is too serious to develop as a form of devil’s advocacy.
Not in America where racism is incessantly used as a political football by the left and the right (for example, left wing Twitter has been doing its best to racialize the Rittenhouse saga despite that all parties were white; similarly right).
> As for the issue of identity politics, I think that’s another discussion entirely.
As previously mentioned, it's deeply intertwined with how we talk about "racism".
To quote the dev on this himself:
>And putting it in a DB table means someone could very easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.