What they are doing is equating a philosophy of life that builds people up and built this country, with skin color. This is done with the explicit purpose of driving a wedge against it. If you are white, they want you to believe it has been stripped of its moral value, they want you to be embarrassed of it. If you are not white, they want you to see it as alien and a foreign imposition over you.
In actual fact the principles that lead to a positive, productive life are available to anyone who is willing to live them out. Some cultures embody these principles more than others, your family culture may have taught you these or it may not, your parents may have lived these out before the eyes of their children or they may not have, but in the end anyone can choose them regardless of where they came from or the color of the bag of flesh that houses their bones.
In essence these are Christian values, or you could say Judeo-Christian values, the values of “western civilization” which is itself a partially Christianized, imperfectly Christianized representation of those values. Western civilization is itself cutting itself off from the very principles that made it into something worthy of respect. Without them it really does devolve into something embarrassing to behold.
When they equate these principles with skin color they knowingly (I believe) shut people off from the only thing that can give purpose and trajectory to their lives. These are evil and empty people, race obsessed. Their racism is an intellectual judo, though, meant to overthrow something spiritual and philosophical without ever having to explicitly name it.
Exactly right. The left’s use of race as a tactic is incredibly cynical and dishonest. The classical liberalism of America’s founding and of modern conservatism is not racist. In fact it’s just the opposite. It is just as universalistic as socialism when it comes to race. IMO this is one of the chief reasons it is a threat to the left. They rightly recognize it as a competing universalism that offers similar transcendence of categories like race. But they knowingly slander it as racist because 1) they have no intellectual decency since for them the ends justify all means, and 2) it’s an effective tactic.