Further, race can be used as a means by which to deny entire populations, within a larger group, the rights which everyone else expects. We consider this wrong, because we believe in universal and equally available human rights. Segregation was wrong because it treated one group differently than others.
Racism is wrong because it can be and often is cruel, and as a culture, we reject cruelty.
Put another way, racism is wrong for exactly the same reason Political Correctness is wrong, in that the latter consists almost entirely in treating groups–political conservative–as absolutely homogeneous, and susceptible to pre-judgement en masse, without any fact gathering, without any effort at establishing a mutually empathetic and connected bond, and without ever looking back, to see if any mistakes were made.
Practically, why does the Left obsess about racism, over and above the obviously useful propagandistic uses to which the word “racist” can be put?
If one looks carefully, the charge of racism actually serves as a focal point for hatred. Hatred, itself, comes to provide a sense of meaning in those fully infused with it.
Conformity is the only true value on the left, but conformity is much, much easier to enforce when an external target can be created to mobilize the emotions of violence through group rejection of the Other.
Put one more way: looked at objectively, Leftism furthers and perfects all the social and individual malignancies which lead to and have always led to, throughout history, misery, death, destruction, poverty, and diseases of the mind and body.
It literally takes everything bad in human history, distills it, concentrates it, then reintroduces it as a panacea for precisely the ills it creates and fosters.
To call this madness is not an exaggeration. All of our top schools are suffused with cognitive distortions so severe they should qualify as clinically schizophrenic.