It can also be psychologically damaging for the people adopting racist* perspectives. It can degrade their quality of life in interacting with other people and lead to a siloed cultish feeling of threat that is not fully justified, for instance.

(* Here I use "racist" in the sense meant by the Mathison: a synonym for an expression of racial bigotry, regardless of who is expressing it. I acknowledge that the definition is contested, but since I'm responding to its usage with this definition, I am adopting this meaning for the purposes of this post.)

I have observed a number of black Medium authors justify their stances with messaging that sounds roughly like, "I'm just calling out behavior stereotypical for that group." There are some instances when this is important to do: there can be alignments of culture with race, and cultures can have problems that need attention. However, it's very easy to slip from a description of actual problems into a more general disdain or hatred for a whole group of people, and it's not at all clear that even the authors always manage to avoid this, let alone that they avoid inducing this in their readers.

However, to be fair, while black Medium writers produce the largest fraction of such problematic outlooks--probably because people feel, incorrectly, that it is "racist" to give pushback against racial bigotry--it's not exclusively a black phenomenon. Firstly, I've witnessed other examples--usually slightly better disguised, but not really any less troubling. Secondly, to say or imply that "black Medium writers are racist" is, itself, bigoted, and contains in it all the problems I describe above.

To be clear: there are many Black medium writers who write on racial issues and convey serious concerns about racial justice and racial harmony without drifting into racial bigotry. This is a valuable endeavor. But there are also some who at times, alas, exemplify the behavior they claim they want to stop.