

There’s a thread of truth to what they say. Humans are tribal, but that doesn’t mean that what we use as in group and out group signifiers is universal and lines up with western European racial boundaries.
In some cases, existing group divisions were altered to fit with other peoples notions about how it should work: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734.amp
In Africa, certain ethnic groups defined themselves based on language and a rough “wide or narrow” metric. Talk or short, skinny or stocky, wide nose or thin. Etc. it’s like a racial categorization from the west, but it uses features that we don’t usually use , and only became overt once it was used by colonial powers to classify people and assign social status.
Point being that “I don’t know you so I don’t trust you” is a human tendency, but race and racism as we would recognize the terms are not, they’re just a specific instance.
The fun part of the idiocy is that the complaints are all public. A major complaint the financial industry had was that anyone could go and just say anything about an institution and it could be found by anyone.
So the only part they left behind is peoples ability to say bad things about financial institutions, and took away the agency’s ability to say “actually, quicken loans hasn’t been randomly adding $50 fees to mortgage payments”.