It could be argued that racism has positives. Racism ultimately stems from in-group preference, so while it might lead to discrimination against the outgroup there's also an element of "us" in the us vs them mentality of racism which is very important. For most of human history, being exiled from your ingroup has been a death sentence or at the very least a life-ruiningly big deal. Try surviving without an ingroup with a broken leg for instance. Racism gives you a huge ingroup - your race is a huge, extended family. Its achievements aren't your achievements so much as what a beloved family member has handed down to you.
If your in-group are racists, it gives them a huge advantage because it allows them to consciously act with the interests of their in-group in mind. Ever notice that the countries with the most racial mindsets (usually colonial Europeans like white Americans) were founded by people who basically swept over entire depopulated continents as one in-group and built some of the strongest, most prosperous countries the world has ever known?
The United States is literally a product of racism and would not be nearly as successful as it is today if it wasn't. Latin America, which was pumped and dumped by the Spanish for resources instead of racially colonised, ended up being a dysfunctional mess once the Spanish left with their mountains of silver. It was Ben Franklin of all people who said the following: "the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Compexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."
Think about the Indo-Europeans, who formed ethnic aristocracies over the neolithic people they conquered in Europe and West/South Asia and whose culture, language, way of life and even Y chromosome DNA spread itself through space and time more than any of them could have imagined. The most red-headed people in the world are not the Irish, but the Udmurts of the Volga area, and the Bashkirs have a high frequency of the same R1b subclade that the Welsh, Scottish and Irish have. If generation ships ever make it out past the Oort cloud, they'll be carrying the Y-DNA of the Yamnaya along with the English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Farsi, Urdu and Hindi languages and alleles from the ancient Pontic-Caspian Steppe. The Indo-Europeans would have been appallingly racist by enlightened 21st century standards, but the in-group preference that came with that turned out to be their strength.
Look at the Jews. As part of their diaspora mentality, the Jews have very strong in-group preference, and discriminate against gentiles (Jews have long been prohibited from charging interest to their own, but are free to charge interest to gentiles). One need look no further than the practice of male genital mutilation among Jews - the Jews originally only removed the end of the foreskin in circumsision (this was called milah), but after Jews in pagan Greece started pulling the skin back up over the glans to assimilate into the population, the Rabbis were furious and demanded that Brit Peri'ah, basically the removal of the entire foreskin, be practiced. The Jews went to such great lengths to differentiate themselves from the outgroup and set themselves apart from them that they were willing to mutilate themselves for it.
The Jews are incredibly successful. Jews are only 2% of the US population and extremely overrepresented in US finance, media and academia. The Jews' history of participating in the skilled trades has also resulted in them pioneering many successful brands. You'd have a hard time walking into a cinema without seeing a Jewish director's name on the film timetable, or walking through a central business district without seeing a Goldman Sach's, or getting onto a train without being in the same cabin as someone wearing Levi's underwear. When you turn on CNN, it probably doesn't occur to you that about half of the executives are Jews. It's not a coincidence - the Jews have in-group preference, they look out for their own to the point of practicing ethnic nepotism. Do you think a gentile Spielberg would have gotten into Hollywood? Israel exists after 2000 years of diaspora with a revived, previously liturgical language now spoken by millions of people because the Jews were conscious of their in-group and acted in its interests to advance it like no other group has. Hatred of the Jews by non-Jews revolves around the fruits of Jewish in-group preference. The Jews were brutally expelled from 109 countries, mostly for being at odds with the gentile population because they refused to stick to their own, and not only survived it but actually managed to come out more powerful. The Jews are the greatest practitioners of racism the world has ever known.
It seems like the only problem with racism is that it's outdated in 2020, and that's probably because it makes more economic sense to have everyone, regardless of the colour of their skin, on the same plantation, earning the same wages to spend on plastic crap, spending 12+ years in the same Prussian schooling system, etc, so the capitalists discourage the wageslaves from fighting each other along racial lines. Anti-racist rhetoric seems to revolve mostly around not rocking the boat. "Why be racist, sexist or homophobic when you can just be quiet?". "Diversity is our strength, we should celebrate our differences to show that we are all the same". It's okay to have your own culture or even to silently have a grudge against another culture, just don't do anything meaningful about it that goes beyond those sentiments. It's okay to have your own lovely ethnic food and exotic language, but make sure to sell your ethnic food to us with VAT attached and only speak your exotic language at home so business can flow more freely and social cohesion in a multiethnic society isn't threatened. Has liberating African-Americans from the back of the bus really done anything but integrate them into the position of wageslaves slightly more impoverished than their white counterparts? The mentality of "moving past" race and getting along as one giant workplace, which is clearly peddled by wealthy people (who control the flow of information), seems to be a lot like the practice of kicking your kids out at 18 ("moving past" your actual family, rather than your extended racial family) to go be rent slaves that was peddled to boomers by wealthy people (who control the flow of information). Theodore Kaczynski put it best:
Even then, is racism really outdated? Groups operating within the Western neoliberal system like the Zionist Azhkenazi Jews, the Chinese diaspora (who have been infiltrating Western academia quite nicely, and who own a surprising amount of infrastructure in Australasia and North America such as the Port of Darwin) or even the visa Indians who run your local Dominos and only hire other Indians are all more successful as a group and more secure as individuals because they discriminate against the out-group. Is anti-racism just a trick a lot of people have fallen for to keep them atomised, unorganised and unlikely to band together to create a more powerful unit for advancing their interests so the pyramid scheme post-industrial information age capitalist economy can be run without opposition? What if people are not victims of systemic racism, but rather systemic anti-racism?
How is racism even bad? How is in-group preference even bad? How is belonging to a huge extended family, and prioritising its safety, security and prosperity over that of members of outgroups who may wish to do it harm even a bad thing? You can argue racism leads to genocide, but does it really? Not all mass butcherings of people have been committed in the name of in-group allegience, and not all groups with in-group allegience have engaged in mass butchering - look no further than the Mongols torching multiethnic cities for refusing to bow to their authority, or the ATF/NSA/CIA/US law enforcement's beige-coloured ongoing multiracial campaign of terror against the American people. Is racism not just the ethnic equivalent of trade unionism or a town's inhabitants petitioning against fracking in its area? If we are all truly just individual worker units, it should be pretty silly and arbitrary to band together over anything we have little to no choice over, even if it defines the course of our lives. Why is racism bad? How have minorities really benefited from less racism when removing in-groups just allows for easier conversion of most of their waking lives into capital?
