Why is conflating racial prejudice and discrimination with racism a big issue in the classroom?

For me, it's an issue of literacy. Racism and white supremacy have made us illiterate. We don't see systems of power but rather very surfaced attitudes or opinions which have become understood as "racist." Thus racism becomes a synonym for something which should be more specific, namely, racial prejudice or prejudice against certain races.

Discrimination carries the systemic element to it and for me that's the most clarifying part. Not everyone is "racist" in the sense that they benefit from a hierarchical organization of the institutions that create the society we live in. I mean hierarchical in the sense that there are people who have access to institutions, and people who have remained without access for centuries. There are people with better working conditions, and then there are people who's working conditions have killed them. There are people with access to education, and then there are people whose educations were policed daily. These vague generalizations only make sense when they are grafted onto the history of European colonialism.

The access of the one comes at the expense of the other. The beneficiaries of racism are people of European decent, i.e. white people.

Understanding these fine differences remains a difficult task for me, and I am a humanities major at a college in New York City! "critical race theory" has recently been targeted by the Right. at the other end of the spectrum, children are particularly sensitive to the messages and codes they're bombarded with. If we want them to be literate, if we want ALL children to flourish, we need to arm them with a vocabulary that will help them end racism and white supremacy, not disarm them with confusion and misunderstanding. The history and concepts I learned in my (previous) public and parochial education only made it more confusing for me.