I absolutely agree that the onus is not on black people to fix racists. It's on all of us. But when you have a person like Davis trying something like this, the last thing we should be doing is shitting on him for his efforts. We spend entirely too much time in this world ignoring problems hoping they go away, or expecting that ignorant people should just stop being ignorant, or yelling into the ether hoping someone will listen. It takes a LOT of work, an not everyone has the stomach for it and thats fine.
As I said, I think his efforts are laudable, but many go in the opposite direction, believing that social shame is the preferred tool. The thinking being that people will probably always be racist, but you can make it socially unacceptable to espouse or act on that racism in a meaningful way. I personally believe both tools are just a few in a wide toolbox and all should be used in tandem. This is not the only way to handle the problem of racism and believing that it is, is erroneous in my mind.
Where you particularly fall on that specific topic is where many of the arguments in this thread stem from.
Then there's another issue we struggle on: who is receiving the brunt of the
sympathy and understanding in any bad situation with a racial component, which is where we frequently get mired. Example: If Person A does a racist action to Person B, you will frequently encounter umbrage if you start your discussion contribution with "We should understand what feeds into Person A's actions" instead of starting with condemnation of Person A's actions and working your way back to that statement. How that divide is handled feeds back into threads like this one, i.e. people feel the general sentiment is to understand
the perpetrator of a poor action before the victim. Especially in some case where the perpetrator is white and the victim is someone of color.
When you say "Daryl Davis is the way racism should be handled", some people hear "Daryl Davis is the ONLY way racism should be handled". Which is going to bring up the issues above and similar thoughts on things like protests, police action, etc.
Even some of the hotter takes point to this idea. Slayven's first post:
Cool I guess. But fuck the people that think this should be the standard
Good for Davis, but saying it should not be seen as the standard for minorities dealing with racism. That's pretty much what he said.
This is a bit disjointed, because I'm playing For Honor, but these are my thoughts as to what feeds into some of the pushback you're seeing.