i think youre right.
i think defining racism as necessarily instiutional serves a purpose and makes sense in the realm of like academic arguments but most people on earth don't participate in those discourse communities and define racism in the more straightforward way of just being prejudiced against a race. definitions arent deigned by plato's philosopher kings but emerge from common understandings. so "racism" means both of those things at the same time. saying "reverse racism doesnt exist" doesn't make sense because reverse racism is a concept people believe in, and make real when they act in the world based on their understanding of it. you can argue that it is a harmful concept, but to just be like "its not real, what's real is MY theories about how race operates" assumes your subjective persoective has some kind of special access to objective reality. which it does, but so does everybody else's. if people generally agree a word means something, then it does.
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