Americans tied up so much of their image of a "good person" with not being racist, that when in environments with no way to demonstrate that they are not racist, they had to invent new racist things to oppose.
As a millennial, racism was taught to me in k-12 as being perhaps one of the fundamental forces of evil in the world; kind of an analog to what Christian students learn about Satan. As a result, people in my generation have moral codes that revolve around it, sometimes in twisted ways. Someone gets hit by a car but hey were racist? Had it coming.
This really hit it on the head. Racism was presented as the worst transgression anyone could make. Is it a surprise that when the generation raised in that environment reached adulthood - and realised that racism wasn't quite as dead as they thought, some of them would take their internalised morality to the extreme.
