"...but my motivation is to make it easier for someone to acknowledge racism, and ultimately find the courage to use their agency to help tear it down."

Thanks. This is a brilliant frame. One way this might be done is to emphasize the role racism plays in dividing the working class along lines of racial and ethnic identity. As Tim Wise puts it, "race, in other words, has been a weapon with which elites have divided working people from one another and prevented white working folks from developing a strong identification with their counterparts of color." How great would it be, for instance, if BLM used this moment, with so many people paying attention, to pivot the movement and begin to articulate a broader, more inclusive economic message? 

Our focus should be on creating an atmosphere where even subtle racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes and policies are so toxic and stigmatized that no one wants to be associated with them.

It's hard to handle stigmata without associating some church function. Somehow I expect re-education camps whether Communist self-denouncements where you or your family pay for the bullet or auto-de-fey inquisitions.

I'd suggest that "subtle" attitudes and policies aren't such a big deal as egregious attitudes and policies like killing unarmed unthreatening people in the street or denying people promotion or work or domicile simply because of their race/gender/sexual proclivities/religion/other non-threatening characteristic. After that, someone's "attitudes" are basically their business. Sure, put out some warm & fuzzy tolerance PSAs, but the world's nature has been pretty consistent over 10's of thousands of years. Good luck stamping out all hatred and unreasonable attitudes.

While maybe it'd be great to have some dialog on all the fine details, it doesn't seem like we've got the basic big to-do items anywhere in focus. Yeah, we have all the accepting/out-in-the-light humor and college campus PC stuff down and a black president, possibly an upcoming female president along with gay marriage. Only the latter change seems likely to hold at this point - black relations & female equality are still far away from acceptable. Better luck next year or next decade.

MSNBC just allowed complete coverage of one of Trump's rambling stump speeches, this time in Dallas. Next we had snippets of Bernie Sanders' powerful speech at Liberty University. The MSM does not give us anything approaching balance. We will never have a discussion about race if it is left to the hands of MSM.

Aaron 

Stop and Frisk targeted blacks. Slavery targeted blacks.Not all blacks in NYC were stopped by the NYPD. Not all blacks were counted as three-fifths. Both laws were racially-biased in practice. 

The idea that free blacks were free to vote is a lie. Georgia and South Carolina banned free blacks from voting. North Carolina also banned free blacks from voting

 https://books.google.com/books?id=zpmjRm4cdswC&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=free+...

The idea that the three-fifths Compromise was not race-based is another example of attempts to sanitize the Antebellum period. We start with the idea that the war was about state's rights and not slavery. This requires that we ignore that state secession documents listed slavery as the main reason for severing ties with the Union. We next say that the Confederate flags were not racist symbols even though the soldiers fighting under their banners fought for the right of people to hold blacks in bondage. There are even attempts to create black Confederates.

When we come to the three-fifths compromise, some argue that the compromise was not race-based even though the only group who would have only three out of five counted during a vote were black people. Slaves could not vote. The only ethnic group who could be slaves were blacks. The only reason that I can fathom for why this racial gymnastics occurs is that people who were against slavery agreed to the compromise.

The South wanted all slaves counted. 30,000 people got you a Representative. The South would benefit greatly if this measure was accepted. The North did not want the South to gain the amount of power one slave, one vote cast by a white guy would yield. The North did not want the North to reject the Union. The three-fifths compromise was the result. Because the compromise was an "anti-slavery" measure, there is a reluctance to view it as a failure that gave power to the South and created an expansion of slavery.

The three-fifths compromise was a mistake. It helped keep blacks in bondage. Blacks were mere pawns whether you consider the Southern position or the Northern rationale for compromise.