Perhaps the worse problem is systemic racism, the ways in which American institutions have grown up with racial bias built into them since assumptions of white supremacy were a given through most of our history. When racism is structural it can carry on indefinitely even in the absence of people with explicitly racist beliefs. And that's a tough problem because whereas people commonly believe that equal rights should apply to all, they tend to conceive it as if we already have a level playing field, and many will object to proposals that no, the playing field isn't level and making it so will require considerable reform.
In some ways, structural, systemic racism makes the claim "I'm not racist" kind of irrelevant. You don't have to be racist yourself to reinforce racism.
"The Social Justice view is that the existing social systems and structures have grown up under a social order that privileges certain
races over others, and there is no way the influence of that
bias could not have manifested in significant ways (see also,
structuralism and
poststructuralism). These ways (and no other possibilities) are then blamed for the totality of achievement gaps and other sociocultural disparities and named “racism” (see also,
institutional racism,
anti-blackness, and
cultural racism). While there is a kernel of validity in these claims, the totality of the Theory is very unlikely to be right. In fact, it seems to get the matter exactly backwards.
A key point to register here is that, while the usual definition of racism is partially recognized within Critical Social Justice, under its purview, “racism” means something different, or at least something
more—and
more vague. Racism has been re-defined as a system. It’s not an action or a disposition. It’s a mysterious system that is immanent (ubiquitous, ordinary, permanent, but just beneath the surface – see also,
mask). Further, being racist is a property sometimes explicitly connected to white people (see also,
whiteness) and, in some renderings, one that white people cannot possibly escape. Even being actively antiracist begins with recognizing and
engaging one’s own
inherent complicity in racist systems, following Theorists Robin DiAngelo and Barbara Applebaum, for instance. For DiAngelo, the goal isn’t to cease being racist, which is impossible; it is to “be less white.”
“Racism,” then, is a
Trojan-Horse term because it is a powerfully morally salient term—one of the most morally salient in contemporary society—and yet it doesn’t mean what most people think it means. It is very different to be associated with some vague
system of power than it is to intentionally engage in bigoted attitudes and actions against someone based upon facts about their racial, ethnic, or national origin. The Critical Social Justice meaning of “racism,” and what mandates follow from it, are thus able to be institutionalized in many cases because people are allowed to believe that “racism” means the common-parlance definition and, perhaps, something a bit more complicated to do with “systems of racism.” This is to all appearances a deliberate trick being played by advocates of Critical Social Justice on a good-intentioned populace, given the phrasing “systems of racism” (when racism is defined to mean a system in the first place)."
I think the advocates of this position would find your limitation of its relevance to America to be problematic.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-racism-systemic/
