Sorry but if you can't see how going "I get racism is bad, but we should focus on economics first" is actually exactly the type of thing that needs to change I don't know what to say. I know you think you're going "those economic factors affect everyone" (maybe you can see how that's going "all lives matter"?) and you might even go "they affect those minorities more than white people so it will be helping them more" but I hope you can also see that the help will definitely help white people more (because they've been inherently privileged economically) unless we deliberately work to make that not true (which is why people are saying we need to deliberately talk about race; oh and gender too!). And that its only now that white people are starting to have the same screws turned on them that minorities have that people want to do something about it, and going "we need to focus on the economics" just shows that its blatantly loaded. Its essentially saying "well now that its hitting white people too, it really is a problem". Which is inherently dismissive about how its been a constant problem for non-whites.
And we've seen over and over how once white people get back to being comfortable they stop caring about helping non-whites and then start going "I don't know what you're talking about, things are fine, stop trying to make it about race!" And, on top of that, there is some blatant behavior that is working to push things back to where they were before the Civil Rights Movement. And white people are trying to dismiss that behavior as though they're struggling so hard (but how dare we point out that non-whites are struggling just as hard in the same ways, but also are being discriminated against on top of it!?!) that they're just doing what they can to get by and its not their fault if non-whites are hurt by it. That's exactly how they've acted as they've pushed for charter schools and other ways of segregating schools again (which of course they claim is not their reason for doing it, which that's also kinda the point, it doesn't have to be intentionally racist for it to end up being racist; but you know it also is intentionally racist because when shown how its leading to racist outcomes, they pretty much go "so what, its not my fault" or some other manner of trying to absolve themselves of having a role in it because "I'm not racist!!!").
And no clue where you're getting that white people are doing that at all either. They're saying that the economic stuff is bad, but since its hurt non-whites more, we maybe should look at finding a remedy for that instead of trying to marginalize the racism that fueled that behavior (before those assholes decided that "well if we can't be racist, let's fuck everyone over" after the Civil Rights Movment expliclity said "stop being racist you fucking assholes"), which will just kick the can down the road again so white people can go back to their blissful ignorance.
I get that race is a
huge issue in the US (and it's increasingly a major issue here, I'm old and things are changing rapidly, I get that). But some middle-class liberals in the US seem to me sometimes to prefer to ignore the structural question of class, because they benefit from it. The logic of that stance is that in contexts where that are racially homogeneous, there can be no exploitation or inequality. The message that
sometimes comes across is that economic exploitation is fine, as long as the exploiter and exploited classes are evenly divided by race. That seems a convenient position for middle-class and upper class liberals to hold. Race isn't the
only issue, indeed racial inequality to a significant degree depends on a system of economic inequality. The two are not really separable.
Your comments are very US specific. When I was growing up, leftist politics was about economics and class domestically, and anti-imperialism abroad. Race as a domestic issue, while something one had a view on, wasn't that major a topic because the country was overwhelmingly white. Even my dad - who was himself an 'immigrant' and 'person of colour' to use an anachronistic term that wasn't in use then, and would often get racially abused - wasn't that focussed on that. I think in his heart he imagined we'd achieve world socialism and then he'd go 'home' to the formerly-colonialised country he came from. Neither happened in his lifetime, sadly.
I realise that the context is very different and that things like that image meme are used in extremely cyncial ways - as I said, I am sure the intention is to discount racial inequality rather than do something about class. But sometimes I just find it hard to get my head around a US context where economic issues seems to get sidelined in favour of a kind of strictly liberal focus on equal representation, of equality in exploitation. (My dad always found the US baffling in its resistance to socialism, and predicted it would one day turn Nazi - still not clear to me that he was wrong.)
American liberals don't seem all that consistent about opposing imperialism either, hence the Clintons and the frequency with which they bombed dark-skinned foreigners or supported regimes that did so. Actually liberals have a long tradition of being pro-Empire, going back to JS Mill. It was a liberal who took the US into both WW1 and Vietnam, after all.
I actually agree with you entirely about the charter schools thing, that's an argument I've had with US Clinton fans, Hillary being a big proponent of Charter schools. It's similar to the policies introduced by Blarites and taken up by the Tories here. Though to be fair to Blair and Hillary, in both cases the liberal version was more limited in scope and it's the right who then took it and expanded it in a really destructive manner, as a means to reintroduce 'selection' (which here traditionally meant segregation by class, more than by race) and indeed to privatise the school system.
Oh, and while I don't think it's at all surprising that the UK or European left didn't traditionally talk about domestic racial topics (because the overwhelming majority of the population were white) I can't even begin to defend the neglect of gender and the experience of women. That was just a failing of the left, really. Still is, I guess.