The shape of Democratic party

I came across this tweet recently:

The ironic thing is that if you want a more rhetorically conservative campaign in the Democratic party, you want a candidate of color. Otherwise white progressive candidates have to make explicit rhetorical moves to the left on race, like Clinton did in 2016, see "implicit bias". https://t.co/PBUDoBx5Vj

— Avery James (@averyfjames) November 19, 2018

It hints that appointing candidates from particular demographic groups might tone down the rhetoric somethwat. It also seems to be that this has a chance to better represent the position of non-white members of the Democratic party. Take a look at these figures:

Nonwhites are a majority of moderate to conservative Democrats, while whites are a majority (61%) of liberal Democrats. (This from the #VoterSG 2018 survey.) pic.twitter.com/inZLQPJYYn

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) October 14, 2018

I find it unsurprising that such individuals might weight relatively heavily the implications as to civil rights / racism when it comes to choosing who to vote for, but in a strange way is seem to suggest a dependency on the existence of racism in order to push forward a particular political agenda. In a sense for a particular subset of the democratic party there seems to be some fairly strong incentives to appear to challenge racism while simultaneously there exist some incentives to ensure that racism actually isn't dealt with. Call me overly cynical if you wish, but I wonder if this might be a semi-reasonable (if not particularly positive) explanation for some of the strategies deployed which seem to have a high likelihood of backfiring.