It is not the assignment of negative characteristics by race. It’s the reduction of identity to a single factor, race. It’s saying that you are your race, leaving no room for the individual. That’s racism. It’s ideological. It’s a way of seeing all value, interpreting all action, making all value judgments, as if race were the primary and only valid dimension of identity for a person. As if all there was to know about them was exhausted by knowledge of their race.