There’s a significant divide between “America is racist” and “America was founded on, and still preserves, many institutions that are fundamentally biased against some people.”

I don’t know many people who seriously claim that every single atom of American life is racist.

No actual person thinks this but it’s the take away when you compress it down to memes / read about it in media.

America has no room for nuance, it’s either every police shooting is justified or every shooting isn’t justified. It’s probably not a great way to actually run a country but it makes for great media sales / entertaining politics.

No. In daily life America and Americans are typically nuanced. Like literally any other country.

It’s the internet that disposes of context and nuance.

No the internet can do that just fine, the twitterization of social media in to short quippy "bumper sicker" took the worst aspects of politics (sound bites and bumper stickers") and normalized that in to the "correct" way to debate or discuss topics.

Gone where the long form threaded topics of forums, usenet, etc, replaced with 180 characters quips

I will agree that twitter irrevocably has changed the online landscape. But I believe it's the ability to instantly transmit things that has pushed towards shorter and shorter content. For example Vine really took off, and now you have Tiktok/Instagram reels/etc. Not to mention Snapchat/Periscope.

It's a lot faster to digest and get a dopamine hit from a <140 char tweet (now <380 chars) than poring over a book, so the outcome of twitter was destined to happen.

Yes well said, that’s exactly what I was trying to convey.

What year did America go from actually being racist to just pretending?

I think a strong argument is to be made that in the early ‘70s the tide turned and racism became viewed as old fashioned and embarrassing.

I think a subtle distinction has to be made: being labelled a racist became the worst thing ever. Which has led to absurd scenes where someone conducts themselves in blatantly racist ways and then says "That's not who I am". It has become a noun, rather than a verb