I guess you've failed to notice the wildly expanded usage of the term.
OK, so I said I was going to respond to this. Unfortunately, it kind of warrants a longer response than I feel like making right now, but I'll go ahead and give as concise of a response as I can right now (which I probably should write an essay on, but I probably won't).
First, I entirely acknowledge the fact that labels like racist are frequently overused, and that's one of the biggest issues I have with some social justice movements. It A) muddies the water, so to speak, and B) alienates potential allies. Calling a working-class white guy who voted for Trump because of his dissatisfaction with the Democrats is (probably) not racist. Slavoj Zizek (an actual Marxist, rather than one of the straw commies certain reactionaries like to screech about), whom I brought up in an earlier post, has brought up this exact point over and over again. He's said that, if there is a path to a more authentic left in the US, it must necessarily go through Trump's base.
That said, just because terms like racist are sometimes overused, that doesn't mean that they don't have a valid use. Richard Spencer is a racist, and should be referred to as such. Admittedly that's a rather extreme example, and it gets blurry between the two examples I've given, but there are certainly less extreme examples where the term racist is completely appropriate. That is the fundamental different between terms like racist and reactionary buzzwords like SJW, which are ill-defined and have absolutely no other purpose than to shut down discourse.
