> I do think we need a better way to callout subtle and insidious racism in people's beliefs and actions but make it an educational opportunity for growth for the person and for society, not the instigation of a pile on.

Terms like "unconscious bias" and "cultural appropriation" are fine. They have clear meanings, and AFAICT the terms themselves are never in dispute. In my personal experience, racism is a Very Big Deal, like murder, and it seems fundamentally wrong to diminish the meaning of the word by applying it to subtle, unintentional acts with debatable implications. It's as if one were to use the word "systemic murder" to describe the inefficient (in one's opinion) allocation of resources in medical research, and then used that term to characterize an entire society as essentially murderous and fascist. It just does not compute, and I don't think it does any good to insist on such terminology when it inevitably causes the conversation to derail into semantic disputes. Then the terms become useless for evangelizing, but very useful as litmus tests to enforce political allegiances and attack heterodox and non-conformist thinking.

I'm guessing that you were fine with my first two examples since you didn't point those out, so I'll just provide sources for the last three. (Two are combined). Note that I rarely view anything on social media, so I'm not in that conversation. My views are my own. If they seem to echo the "talking points" of someone I've never heard of or some organization that I don't pay attention to, that is a coincidence. HN is my biggest news source by far. If you should happen to find my views distasteful, I assure you that it is due to a vastly different perspective and not bad faith.

The admiration of Jews had nothing to do with Israel or Christianity. (As you noted, that could have made it a terrible example). The English lecturer Stephen Lamonby was fired as a result of his admiration of Jewish academics, saying "I was excited to think she might be one of them – excited to meet a Jewish physicist, who had been my heroes since boyhood."[0] This is precisely the opposite of what I would consider racism. It gets more interesting in that he defended the progressive position that blacks are disadvantaged by society, and this was somehow twisted around to make him a "racist". Not only did he say this, but he's apparently devoted significant time to helping out in disadvantaged countries and while in the UK gave special help to overseas students, and was attacked as racist for this: "Mr Lamonby noted that some of the overseas students were struggling to grasp even the most basic elements of engineering and said that he stayed behind to help three of them. ‘She said I shouldn’t have done this,’ he recalls. ‘I said I had a soft spot for young black men because they are often from environmentally disadvantaged societies.‘"[1] This reads like admirable activism, the rare person who practices what they preach, and about as far from real racism as you can possibly get. If one is using a definition of "racism" that can be twisted into making this man's actions racist, then that definition should be discarded. I will note that some of his comments, mainly asking a woman if she was Jewish because he thought she was talented and was excited to potentially be meeting one of his heroes, does seem obtuse and perhaps deserving of a minor rebuke. But not being fired as a "potential racist", which essentially nukes his whole career. The BBC reports a single allegation that he said black students did not have it "in their DNA to do engineering"[2], but he flatly denies this. The allegation comes from a single person who could be lying or have misheard, and it goes so directly against the spirit of his other quite progressive comments that it's hard to believe he would have ever said that.

About "declining to support partisan, an openly Marxist corporation", this is controversial and the import is highly disputed, so I will try to be very precise with my language. The common defense is that "the founders being Marxist doesn't mean that it's a Marxist movement", but this defense only works if you ignore the context. The context is this critique: "And one of the critiques that he shared–a loving critique, as I would want to point out, by the way–is that he was concerned or is concerned that there’s a lack of perhaps ideological direction in Black Lives Matter that would allow it to be, to fizzle out in, as he said, in comparison to Occupy Wall Street. As you advance in your own organization, as you all are headed to Cleveland to participate in this Black Lives Movement conference, how do you respond to that particular critique?" To which BLM founder Patrice Cullors responds, stating why she thinks that the BLM movement has the ideological direction to succeed: "Um, I think that the criticism is helpful. I also think that it might–. I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out. It just gets stronger, and we see it, right... We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame." [4] That is, BLM has adequate ideological direction because it's in a larger ideological frame. She makes it sound very much like that larger frame is the frame of Marxist ideology, but we don't have to agree on that. Now I was originally referring to the BLM corporation rather than the movement, but I have to be very precise with my language, and her interview was discussing the movement, not the corporation. I will bring the thread back now to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc., of which Patricia and Alicia are founders. Hopefully we can agree that the corporation itself is closely associated with Marxist ideology. We don't have to get into the complexities of the larger movement.

The "declining to support" part comes from the Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's apparent endorsement of the BLM's more mainstream goals, but his refusal to endorse the BLM organization itself (the corporation) and its radical, ideologically-driven goals. (BLMGNF has since remove some of the more controversial goals from its website). "The CEO’s apparent redefinition of company culture felt personal, hinging on the pressure Armstrong felt from employees to say Black Lives Matter. They view the statement as moral, not political or activist. “A lot of people feel that saying Black lives matter is an ethical statement. They feel it should be an easy thing to say,” one engineer says. Armstrong said in June that he agreed with the statement, and that police brutality was a problem. But he wavered on whether a statement that included “Black Lives Matter” would mean endorsing BLM as an organization and set of policies, like defunding police."[4] This famously provoked Dick Costolo's thinly veiled threat that Armstrong would be shot in the (presumably Marxist) revolution.[5] (Sorry if you dislike the source, but the tweets have been deleted since and that source still has them). Armstrong was harshly criticized for his neutrality, with the more extreme non-violent responses reading like this "NEW: @Coinbase announces new commitment to a white supremacist workplace."[6]. It's interesting that a "committed white supremacist workplace" can be sympathetic to the wider BLM movement even while remaining politically neutral. I'll also note that BLMGNF receives allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars in donations (but I can't source exact numbers because it's not public) and funnels them to the Democratic Party through ActBlue[7]. An endorsement of BLMGNF constitutes at minimum an endorsement of the Democratic Party, and can easily be perceived as an endorsement of Marxist ideology. I think it goes without saying that a CEO should be able to remain politically neutral and not have to endorse a particular political party or ideology, whether directly or indirectly. But prominent, influential progressives apparently feel like neutral people should be slaughtered.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8544279/University-...
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/Lecturer-sa...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-53489171
[3] https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives
[4] https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit...
[5] https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/01/former-twitter-ceo-fant...
[6] https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1310654284674015237
[7] https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019