Idk, I struggle with this. I agree that watering down words is a problem. For example see people saying speech can be violence or even inaction can be violence

Idk, I struggle with this. I agree that watering down words is a problem. For example see people saying speech can be violence or even inaction can be violence or some like, but I think humans are tempted to ascribe the past to evil. If you think racism has to be intentional then it's an easy jump to say that racists must be aware of their racism, and before you know it you believe that evil looks like Voldemort and not some guy administering a study about syphilis. I think the truth is people in the past were much more explicitly racist, but also used a lot of the same excuses you'd see today. Things like the economics dictating that film should be optimized for light skin, or worrying about property values or something. By and large people don't think of themselves as racist so they don't do things with racist intent, they just happen to be racist and that influences the the things they do. Plus I'm not convinced that anything has free will making the whole question of intent less useful anyway. But, I also definitely do think there is something worse about someone who hates black people and uses a racial slur to describe them compared to a model trained on humanity doing the same, but certainly both are huge problems, and it can't slip my mind that the racist person was also just trained on humanity's racism