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These three incidents also raise questions about the actual extent of racism. What does it mean when many, if not most, acts of egregious racism — the kind that go wild as video on Twitter and Facebook and often attract international news reports — are rooted in some form of mental imbalance?

Shocking-looking incidents captured on smartphone videos are among of the reasons many people say racism is spreading these days, according to police.

Another reason for some people’s perception of rising racism comes from the other end of the severity spectrum. It revolves around how the definition of racism has been stretched recently by a cohort of academics and others who are advancing the dangers of “unconscious racism.”

Some activists have embraced these academic theories to condemn, for instance, the momentary feeling a person has when realizing an “other” person is, at one level, different, on the basis of colour (or sex or economic status). They argue this is an act of racism (or bigotry), even when that person never actively discriminates against another, which is the classic definition.

With so much grey area these days about what is and isn’t racism, it seems there would be better ways to handle possibly racist incidents than to highlight them without context. No wonder there were tempestuous responses when Facebook posts were put up by Burnaby’s Vassell, an anti-racism advocate, and Noor, who had earlier organized a protest outside Vancouver’s Trump Tower. It took police and journalists to provide a fuller story.