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Motivated by a Manifold market on whether racism is bad [1], I thought it might be profitable to argue the opposite. Alas, having drafted my argument, I don't think it is appropriate to post in a place where my ID is tied to my real name. So here is an argument, advocatus diaboli:
Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family. What I discovered living in a foreign culture is that people tend to have an ingroup bias to their own ethno-cultural group, and Westerners call this racism. It is easier to communicate with people of shared language, and people of the same cultural background will have shared interests. People of shared ethnic group are more likely to share values, and more likely to agree on topics political and personal. This isn't even a conscious thing: in my experience people of a shared ethnic group are even more likely to make strong eye contact with each other.
The bias is similar to how (most) people have an ingroup bias for their own family: I don't see my siblings often, but when we meet we connect strongly, and discover inadvertently that we face similar challenges and overcame them in similar ways. If my sibling confesses to me of a misdemeanor, I am not likely to hold it against them, and if they confessed to me a felony I'm not sure I would report them. If they are in need, I would help them with minimal complaint, and although we disagree vehemently in politics, we still love each other. My family is my ingroup. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things are.
Now at the social level, that ingroup bias for family has its drawbacks: nepotism is common and harms society as a whole, and as I would be willing to help my sibiling get away with a crime, so does that closing of ranks around family horrific enable horrific acts, domestically, in the wider society, and even at the level of public policy and the economy. However, on balance the ingroup bias for family is a great thing (there is a reason why evolution has selected for it!). People take care of each other, they love each other, loneliness is diminished, and we trust each other more.
This is also what I see as an outsider in the foreign culture: people take care of each other, they love each other, they find companionship with each other, and they trust each other more because they share ethnic and cultural bonds. And while those bonds disadvantage me as a foreigner in their society, they have provided an evolutionary advantage, and I can't deny envying them life in the hamlet their forefathers made.
[1] https://manifold.markets/levifinkelstein/is-racism-bad
"Racism" is an anti-concept. It is a word of activist power. It groups a whole bunch of unlike phenomena together, and then the people who can use the word can equivocate on the definition in order to target the people they want to target for shaming and cancellation.
An example of the game plan is:
Another way of saying this is that "racism" is any idea that opposes the current left/center-left establishment ethnogensis or ethno-preservation projects. So if you are against busing ethnic Polish and Irish white kids to black neighborhood schools, you are against a certain ethnogensis project, and therefore racist. If you are against historically black universities, or against a law making certain hair styles a protected characteristic, you are against a certain ethnology-preservation project and therefore racist. If an asian-American mom wants her daughter to marry an Asian guy, that is irrelevant to any establishment plans, so the establishment does not care and does not consider the mom a racist.
A function mirrored by terms like 'woke' or 'socialist/communist' on the right.
I think that we should not be so quick to throw out the useful-definition-of-the-term baby with the misuse-by-cynical-activists bathwater in each of these cases.
It's true, on the one hand, that 'racist' gets used inconsistently and imprecisely by activists on the left to smear opponents or apply 'the worst argument in the world' to things they dislike.
It's also true that there are a specific set of well-defined and useful meanings of the term, that are used honestly by many serious people and are important tools in the intellectual toolbox for anyone who wants to discuss these topics.
In general, if we threw away every term or philosophy or position that was misused or misapplied by cynical activists, there wouldn't be anything left to talk about in the Culture War Thread at all.
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