The modern GOP has some racists in it, but at least apologizes for it. The modern Democratic Party has mainlined racism and institutionalized racism in routine interactions business and education. I would 100% rather deal with a Steve King who worries about white replacement, than with all the ways white progressives find to center race, use them as clubs against other white people, and disrespect the autonomy of minority groups.

This argument would be more persuasive if you could name one of the racists in the Democratic party, and that racism was something ordinary people would recognize as such; by way of example, I just named two Holocaust deniers.

If you define “racism” as “treating people differently based on race”—a pretty typical definition—Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and most other Democratic politicians would count. It’s a different, more patronizing and paternalistic racism, but it’s racism nonetheless.

Indeed, this sort of racism is pervasive among at least progressive democrats. See: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen.... It’s been wild to me to realize how many progressives I know would hate Bangladeshis if they were white. But as far as I can tell they don’t think non-whites have moral agency.

Rayiner, I have the conventional, non-Twitter non-message-board definition of racism, the same definition I'd get from a random person I stopped on the street. There's no interesting conversation to be had if we're going to just say "racism means whatever I can persuasively argue it means". You can "persuade" anybody of anything on a message board just by exhausting them, which is how a lot of really stupid lefty thought happens.

So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

You made an observation that implied it was somehow risible to think the GOP is a racist party. I don't think it's especially useful to designate one party or another as "racist". But what I said is true: it is not a mystery why people think the GOP is racist: there are out-and-proud racists in high elected office in the GOP, and there aren't in the Democratic party.

> Rayiner, I have the conventional, non-Twitter non-message-board definition of racism, the same definition I'd get from a random person I stopped on the street.

I'm not using a novel definition of racism here. Promoting racialization (categorizing people into different races), and treating people differently based on their race--both under the law, through racial preferences, and socially, through DEI--is racism. And Democrats do it much more than Republicans.

> So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

The Republican Party has some racists. In the case of Steve King, the party stripped him of his committee assignments and he lost his seat.

The Democratic Party is engaged in a fundamentally racist project of co-opting minority identities to advance the ideology of white liberals. It starts with promoting racial identity in schools, focused on an oppression narratives. "Asian studies" curricula, for example, focus on discrimination against Chinese Americans in the 1800s (people few Asian Americans trace their ancestry to), instead of for example the rapid upward mobility of Vietnamese, Koreans, and Indians in the 1960s and 1970s (which many Asian Americans today do trace their ancestry to). It continues to Democrat-dominated educational and professional institutions that center people's race and expressly treat them differently based on it.

The fact that it's a paternalistic sort of racism--Democrats think they're helping--doesn't change the fact that it's racism. At the end of the day, all of this is to advance the agenda of white Democrats. That's quite apparent when any non-white Democratic group diverges from white Democrats either out of cultural differences or divergent interests (e.g. Asian Americans when it comes to color-blind metrics or Black Americans when it comes to religion).

My feeling is that there only two kinds of people who would find this argument persuasive: (1) people who already strongly believe it, and (2) people who don't read it carefully. The argument relies on its audience assuming that any noxious behavior involving race is "racism", and that simply isn't the case. There is no equivalence to be drawn between Paul Gosar denying the Holocaust and overeducated, cliquish busybodies at nonprofits "co-opting" minority identities.

The minorities can speak for themselves on this issue (and are, by voting out the co-opters and switching parties). At least, they can as long as Paul Gosar doesn't have his say.

I didn't say that the Republican party was going to lose all minority support, or that every Republican is racist. As I said, I don't think it's productive to describe any party as "racist" (though apparently you disagree). But if I asked you to guess which party has the big-state governor candidate who paid $5000 to be featured prominently on the openly white-supremacist site that featured the Tree of Life shooter, you would not honestly have to think carefully about the question. It is, as I said, not a mystery why people say that the GOP is a racist party; it is many things, and one of them is the party for racists.

You make some great and insightful commentary on many issues here, but I wonder if your fealty to the US Democrat party is putting some ideological blinders on. Racism meaning "treating people different on the basis of race/skin colour" is a pretty normal understanding of the term, and certainly it's not jargon from "Twiter or a message board". The random person on the street would likely agree that "treating people differently on the basis of race" is racism, plain and simple.

And as such, Rayiner's point about elected reps in the Democrat party, including but not limited to the President and high-ranking members of the Senate and House, making race the lens through which everything is discussed and planned for, is racism plain and simple. And it's frustrating for minorities to be disrespected and have their agency taken away by mainly caucasian liberals pretending to represent us. The sad part is that people like Biden and Warren know better, but they're just pandering with to a specific demographic that also views race as the primary driver of everything, but that in turn makes the middle ground also shrink, as people naturally look to mimic their leaders.

This tiresome focus on race-for-everything is making society much more racist, not less, and yes, I would agree it's mainly the Democrat party and it's current policies and rhetoric that is worsening it.

Both 'Democrat party' and a definition of racism that strips it of any notion of prejudice or animus (compare that to, say, one you might find in a dictionary) are very much politically-inflected jargon.

I don't know about other people, but being treated differently based on your race doesn't actually make me feel better just because the other person thinks they're helping.

Sure and I (a white Eastern European immigrant) might place a different weight on those thoughts and feelings in part because you are a brown South Asian immigrant, without it being racism. It's a shoddy redefinition better abandoned in poorly ventilated dorm rooms and talk radio studios. You touch on the problems with the whole 'who are the real racists' millstone yourself when you mention agency. If Democrats are the real racists, what sort of rubes are the majorities of Black Americans who vote for them? It just doesn't go anywhere but a circle of nothing or worse.