If that's really what he's saying, then that's even dumber. You can change how you think. You can help to change the thinking of the people you come in contact with. You can't change anyone you've never met, particularly the people who treated Tyson as a shoplifter. I'd love it if racism were to just disappear too. But wanting it to happen doesn't make it happen.

The point being made here is that making the system even more racist is going to make the problem even worse. It's bad to assume Neal DeGrasse Tyson is a shoplifter because of the color of his skin. It's also bad (it may or may not be worse, but it is in no way good) to assume a person will discriminate against others because of the color of his skin.

Let's pretend there are no races for a second. What would racist people do? They would probably still hate on "others". They would probably not have the vocabulary or the knowledge to group people, but they would still hate "others". The fact that racist hate other races is just incidental to the fact that we categorize people, and then they use that as a tool / avenue for their hatred. So why would we promote their tool for hatred? We don't categorize people based on eye color, so why skin color?

The idea is not to lose identity and pretend we're all the same, but rather to avoid explaining things with race. When someone behaves a certain way, or when someone can't get a job, or got the job, the explanation should not include race, because it's just not needed, it's inaccurate, and it promotes the semantic tools for racist to leverage and keep hating.

I'm definitely open to why this is wrong, so corrections are more than welcome.

We are sadly forced to "categorize" people of certain "races" because when you in fact meet an enormously successful astrophysicist who is African American, that person almost certainly had to achieve that status in the face of many completely intractable obstacles put up by society, compared to an enormously successful astrophysicist who is white and had no such obstacles.

Now, any person that achieves anything had to overcome obstacles; however if you met a successful scientist who was say, an injured Iraq war veteran, or someone who went through struggles above and beyond what most of us go through, you'd likely give that person some credit for achievement in the face of very great obstacles. Looking at the plight of African Americans in this country in a critical fashion would reveal that they also are subject to significant struggles that should be acknowledged.

Nowhere in that above sentiment lies any notion of spreading hatred towards white people. Only that, since I'm not an Iraq war veteran, I don't get to run up on stage and claim a purple heart.