It just seems like there are two categories of whites when it comes to this: those who are unaware of their racism and those who are aware of their racism.
Those who are unaware of their racism are usually white liberals.
Those who are aware of their racism fall into two subcategories: the ones who embrace it and the ones who use their awareness as much as they can to prevent themselves from embracing it. I find this category to be less common overall.
I feel like my growing skepticism of white people makes me sound like a paranoid weirdo, but I look back at all the microaggresions I faced alongside the fact that all the mask-off racism I've received online makes me think that whites only feign not being racist when they can't hide their hate behind anonymity.
I am genuinely at a point where I think most white people see me as some kind of inferior, and it's gets so damn hard not to internalize this and hate myself over it.
Yeah among white people who don’t explicitly think racism is good, there’s a pervasive mentality of “Well I’m a good person and good people aren’t racist so I won’t even entertain the notion that I might be acting on biases.” You gotta check those all the time, practice mindfulness when it comes to marginalized people outside your demo.
Not to get all linguistically deterministic about it, but I do wonder if the framing was of biases rather than of racism, if it would get more white people to think that way. White people tend to go right to the vulgar, extreme sort of racism when they think of that word, so they overlook the sort of microaggressions where it’s like, yeah, you didn’t use the n-word but you still weren’t acting cool.