Well, shit. I was going to write just a sentence or 2 about how I don't have answers, apparently my muse decided I shall write a whole essay about how I don't have answers.

There are some ground rules you and I can agree on, I'm sure: human beings are human beings, regardless of race, and as such have certain inalienable rights like life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom to assemble, freedom of speech, freedom to defend themselves from tyranny, freedom from slavery, genocide, etc. These rights apply regardless of appearance, sex, gender expression, race, religion, ancestral background, caste, sexual orientation, IQ, sins of the father, what-have-you. If we align on all that, we're on the same page. You're in my tribe.

Well, almost every culture believes its own outlook is the correct outlook. The problem with the USA in particular is that it has the hard and soft power to confidently impose their provincial ideas elsewhere. Some of these ideas are good, eg see above.

Other ideas, not so much. There's this definite assumption in the US that what is true in the US is true everywhere in the world. And, unfortunately, the US is deeply fucked up about race (among some other specific topics).

So, right now, because Americans prefer simplifying assumptions,
and historically the US is comprised of (simplifying) 2 peoples (i.e. the descendents of European empires that traded slaves, and the descendents of those slaves) US culture views the entire world through that fucked up demographic lens. Europeans: colonists and slavers. Africans: enslaved and downtrodden. Sure there are other peoples in the US worldview, but these 2 peoples are what everyone talks about and everyone has to be shoved into one of those two boxes.

Even though this is incredibly reductionist, it's a fairly simple narrative, easy to understand, easy to communicate, an incredibly powerful conceptual gravity well: black & white, powerful & powerless, oppressor & oppressed. It is very difficult for Americans to see outside of that dipole, especially because for whole regions of the US, it seems to be self-evidently true.

The most powerful academic theorists on race today are American, and because they are Americans, and even within American culture they are outrageously privileged Americans, these people have platforms and support to amplify this outrageously fucked up, myopic, provincial, self-serving perspective on "transformation and healing" and insist that it applies to every last person on the planet. Ironically, that is exactly the same cultural expansionism that caused problems in the past, but here we are, repeating history.

There are 40 million slaves today, but because American "transformation and healing" experts are obsessed with American history, these real-life, contemporary slaves get very little love and attention from the world.

The world is nuanced. There are, today, whole nations of dark peoples who currently benefit from centuries of privilege. There are whole nations of pale peoples who have quite recently endured the most terrible privations imaginable, including slavery. Some of them no longer exist, because genocide. And all the range in between. Melanin content of the skin is a manifestly stupid way to categorize people, a very stupid proxy for understanding their background, attitudes, success, politics. We were all supposed to have learned this lesson already, but here we are, both racists and so-called anti-racists, insisting we do exactly that.

Americans, and RC in particular, like to put individuals in boxes, in categories, because it lends a false predictability and regularity to the messy chaos of humanity:
"raised owning class, middle class or working class", "Raised Catholic, Protestant or Jew", "white or person of color". I loved RC because I felt like it have me a super-power: all I had to do was know about somebody's background, and because of the RC taxonomy of distress, I felt like I knew what someone's issues were. If they disagreed, clearly they were distressed! Reductive. Circular. Closed. Just like American-style "race work".

I don't have answers. Just, trust your instincts. Don't allow anyone to override what you know to be true and good. Embrace nuance. Listen to people you disagree with. Form genuine bonds with people unlike yourself. Set aside time for genuine fun. That should introduce enough cognitive dissonance to insulate you from some of the more egregious, virulent brainwashing and propaganda you will endure.