I don't mean btw to straw man the comment by mentioning hate crimes/police brutality/etc. First of all, race shows up in much more mundane stuff like awkward conversations about where you're really from, or people making implicit assumptions about my parental background based on my being in tech. It's my bad for not mentioning those as well.

However it's also that these dramatic things, as thankfully rare as they are, have a pervasive effect on one's life. I've never gotten hate crimed, nor do I know anyone who has (knock on wood). But I have thought about whether to buy my parents pepper spray. I have wondered each time a mentally ill person steps on the subway and looks in my direction if I'm about to get hate crimed. My Asian friends and I joke about it because it's something we think about in our day to day life. I can't speak for white people but I don't think most white people have that concern. And if this isn't part of your daily fabric, your daily existence, you might not understand that nobody is "bringing race" into stuff as much as they are sharing their racialized daily existence.

That's what people are doing when they "bring it up", effectively, whether they realize this or not. It's a populist, lazy, anti-intellectual framing which rejects deep engagement with object-level concerns as somehow being less meaningful than "acknowledging/validating my identity/daily experience". It's a rejection of real, actual politics as the domain of creative adaptation and compromise-- as if "sharing [one's] racialized daily existence" obviates the need for this kind of consistent, active, pro-social engagement. And it's bad regardless of who's doing it. It doesn't matter if the people involved wear MAGA hats or not, the underlying dynamics are pretty much equivalent.