Thoughts:

1) I have yet to meet a person who claims the term "racist" as an identity. Nobody shakes your hand and says "hello, I'm a racist" except maybe a white person who is attempting to perform allyship. Sometimes, when people are reflecting back on their own actions in moments of honesty, they might recognize that something they did or said was racist. Kendi does this in his book, which is autobiographical, even as it examines the concept of race in the USA. I do this sometimes in my medium essays, too. But I never want to claim racist as part of my identity. I don't think of racist as an identity because it is a describing word for actions and words. Someone can be a white person who says and does racist things sometimes and anti-racist things other times.

2) I think I am with Kendi and Angela Davis. It is not enough to not act racist. If the society we live in is inherently racist, then to ignore the existence of race is to collude with the ongoing racism (both personal and systemic). So when I say I am white, and I want to examine what my whiteness means in the USA, then I am acknowledging that because of the unexamined parts of my whiteness, I may have been and continue to be saying and doing racist things. I don't want to do that. Yuck.

3) I think words matter. They are like casting a spell. I think also don't want to accept the labels "racist" or "white." I do think I need to claim the label "white" where it currently fits, and then shrug it off after I have done the work to discard those patterns. I don't want to claim "racist" as an identity, but I do want to aware of and accountable for my own racist words and actions. Each person is at a different place on that journey. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that perhaps you have more experience than I do rejecting labels that people try to put on you. So when people come after you on Medium or elsewhere about your rejection of labels, it might show more about them than it does about you.