Some good insights here, and yes, language is so powerful. No group is a monolith. Humans raised in racist world are going to be hurt by it no matter what color they are. We are all racists, and sexists, it's just that our awareness of it affects us. It helps us to be anti-cancer just as a cancer patient would be.

That is, you can suffer from a systemic issue and still be very much against that cancer. Human race is like that--we're slow learners.