Since it is both my profession and nature to be adversarial, I am not very good at non-alienating/non-problematic discussions. That is why I appreciated your article on how to engage without alienating.
In the long view, who is a “target of racism” itself is a moving target. For example, the explicitly racist anti-Chinese movement of the late 19th Century (which led to our first real immigration law) was led by Irish in the labor movement here, who themselves had just escaped from discrimination in both England and the US. The Afro-American League in Los Angeles (a precursor to the NAACP) initially supported this anti-Asian movement. As you point out, racism comes from “the parts of our brain that scan for threats and primes tribal us vs. them thinking.” Who is “us”and who is “them” is itself a moving target.
So, how do we trigger the mammalian “problem-solving” rather than the reptilian “fight-or-flight” parts of our brain? An example of my own, more strident and perhaps “alienating” way of dealing with this, can be found in an article I wrote for the Jewish Journal many years ago:
