Liberalism likes to think that it has the racism issue down. In my experience I have met with a wide array of attitudes from unrepentant to justificatory, to generalists that would try to argue that their racist concepts were now race neutral and held some valid meeting, among liberals and conservatives both.
I could be called politically correct about racism as a matter of attribution but in general I'm nothing like "politically correct" --- that is far too dogmatic for me. But bigotry is bad stuff.
Assuming at one end we can speak about racial history, we can say that african-american music has been phenomenally influential in America and indeed the world, for example, and since at the other end there are many things that cross the line and should not be said, then where is the line? Or is it a line at all?
Personally, if there is the insertion of the slightest racial comment in the criticism of someone that's too much for me. In principle I don't even approve of making fun of Napolean because he was short. You can make fun of his psychology, of his own feelings of inadequacy, but not that he was short. That's an insult to short people that are not megalomaniacs.
One line of reasoning that has allure for some, and which is the motivation for this diary, is the idea by which one can label a person as a traitor to their race. Since this is ostensibly a positive thing about strengthening the given race, some argue this is on the acceptable side of the line. I'm of mixed ethnicity myself, and I understand that it may seem to make some sense to others to claim there is meaning in ethnicity... but I see only meaning in culture... ethnicity is broken, there are people of every ethnicity in every culture, at least to some small degree and anything left over is the exception to the rule.
It is the action against individuals on the basis of sterotypes which is racist. If that individual deserves derision it's still no different.
It's not as though you are letting someone off the hook if you don't use a racially concieved criticism. There are pleanty of other ways to express and feel your emnity with someone who has deserved it. There is no such thing as a race traitor! That's the point. If that were their only crime there would be no issue... it can only be that they are inhumane, a traitor to peace and fairness, there can be no racial standard holding them.
When you look close, although there are things called cultures and there are statistics and arbitrary and not-so-arbitrary means of classification in the biology of man, every group still shares the wide spectrum of human character and personality type.