Kintsugi
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I would argue that it is not slamming people as an entire group, it is bringing to the fore that there is a complicated system in place to which we all contribute at one point or another in which white people are granted privileges others do not benefit from.
I'm really annoyed that I cannot remember where on NPR I heard a segment wherein a man who had some sort of participation in the discourse of equality (I can't remember if he was an activist, and academic, etc.) talked about the first time he realized his privilege. He and his grad student friends formed a club to talk about issues of equality back in the 70s, because the school did not offer gender studies courses and the like at the time. He said that two of the female students were debating whether all women are subject to the same issues. One student was black, the other white. It went like this:
Black female: "What do you see in the mirror before you walk out the door?"
White female: "I see a woman."
Black female: "Right. I see a black woman. I know that everywhere I go, I'm perceived as black."
The interviewee said that it struck him then that when he looked in the mirror, all he saw was a person.
This is the bare basics of privilege, the privilege to take for granted that you are society's default creature, living without the presuppositions placed upon other groups.
If "it" is the feeling that racism is a systemic issue, I beg to differ. We have excellent data and other forms of reliable reporting that says institutionalized racism is, in fact, a thing. I'm pretty damn sure I linked to several examples early in the life of this thread about the school-to-prison pipeline and other examples of racism being systemically enforced.
Why it is so hard to talk about these things is because people perceive that the notion racism is institutionalized and contributed to by everyone (whether of color or not) at some point or another is an attack on individuals or an isolated group like "white people," "white males," etc.
This is absolutely not the case. We are all subject to institutionalized racism and the effects of white privilege (whether we are white or not). It is not painting a group with a large brush at all, because we are not talking about individual acts of racism. We are talking about racism as a system, which is much more difficult to get one's metaphorical hands around and proverbially wrestle with.
Once we can face what exactly it is we're dealing with--a cultural, systemic institution of imbuing some groups with benefits and privileges where others are lacking or, at worst, out-and-out set up for failure by this system--then the difficulty becomes not perceiving the conversation as an endictment that white people must fix it. Realistically, no one group will ever figure out how to begin turning the tides of institutional racism, and it is not the obligation of one group to do so, because we are all willing or unwilling participants in this broken paradigm.
Nevertheless, it is difficult not to take personally as someone with privilege that you are responsible for solving the issue because you belong to a privileged class of people. We are all reponsible for attempting to raise our awareness of this system and to attempt not to contribute to it however we can interrupt its insidious currents.
Sure, but racism between "ethnic" groups and "caucasian" groups is different... because it is not about hate, it is about a system that protects privilege for those who have it and suppresses threats to that privilege.
Institutionalized racism is so, so enormous, so abidingly powerful in its influences, so omnipresent, so insidious. It is bigger than what people think of as being racism. It is bigger than one group vs another. It is so big that is nearly impossible to point out.
Racist rhetoric and acts are, if you will, like a mountain. It's big. It's looming. It seems difficult to shift. Institutionalized racism, however, is like a tectonic plate. It is underlying, vast, and its existence is taken entirely for granted most of the time by all groups.
