Unfortunately, the way that progressive-leaning people talk/think about race is a recipe for OCD fixation, even if it comes from a well-meaning place. I had a very similar experience in college, before I knew I had OCD.

What has helped me with it is just accepting that I may very well do or think something problematic because I grew up in a racially problematic culture and try not to worry too much about it. If someone I know personally tells me something I do is a problem, then I'll make changes, but being your own racism police is a recipe for madness if you have OCD.

Honestly you just have to tune it out. My OCD got LOADS better when I stopped consuming political content. Also don’t let anyone make you feel bad about it either, because at the end of the day you have to protect your mental health 🫶🏻

Since this is an OCD subreddit, I don't think we should really say whether you should feel guilty in any particular moment. Because even if we give an answer in this moment, you might have the same worry about different moment.

But I think there's more I can think to say besides offering reassurance. Whenever I have a theme like this, it helps to understand where these themes are coming from. Given the nature of the question I want to mention that I am south asian.

(Trigger warning: I used examples of various themes in next few sentences)

I like to notice that various themes like racism, harm, pocd, etc. are all topics that have been especially sensationalized in social media/media in general during a time period. For instance, there was this eye-opening comment I read on this subreddit once about how back when discussion and fear about AIDS was much more prevalent in the media, a lot of OCD sufferers worried about AIDS as their main theme.

Similarly, several years ago, there was this whole thing on social media about "don't let the intrusive thoughts win" that I suspect made a lot of people develop harm-related themes (side note: this phrase is also horrible because it completely misrepresents what intrusive thoughts are).

So, back to the racism theme. Because of the increased visibility of right-wing rhetoric in recent years, I think that the topic of racism has become particularly visible on social media, as people are (correctly!) pushing back against increasing racism on social media.

I think it's good to think of this as similar to the AIDS example. Both are issues in the real world that require discussion and solving. So we should not avoid discussion, besides, that would just be feeding into the OCD cycle of avoidance. However, social media/media is not feeding us these things because it wants you to learn. Social media feeds us things it thinks we will click on, so that we spend more time interacting with it.

I definitely think that you should keep learning about racism and thinking about the perspectives you hear online. As bad as the social media algorithm is, it also is a great place to hear many people's perspectives. I just recommend recognizing that you have OCD and the ways in which you interact with social media can turn your genuine desire to be a good person and willingness to learn into something that you end up fearing, rather than being proud about.

Maybe right now you don't have an answer to whether you should use the store, and maybe you'll think of a clearer answer later. These things aren't easy to come to a conclusion about. But the best you can do is keep learning from people's perspectives, and even if you occasionally did the wrong thing one time, that's okay.

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Tangentially related: It also helps me to think that, treated as a whole, social media seems like the real-world embodiment of OCD itself. I mean notice how it stays obsessed discussing the same topic for several months, until it suddenly switches to a different topic when people are no longer interacting with it...

So just like how OCD thoughts are designed to make you interact with it and you have to use ERP to avoid spending energy dissecting each thought, I think it's important to remember that the social media algorithm are also designed to make you interact with it, so you have to use ERP to decide whether its worth expending energy dissecting a post. (I've heard from some friends that instagram comment sections, say, are particularly bad for mental health.)

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I really hope something in this could be helpful, and I intentionally tried to not offer reassurance, so I'm sorry if it doesn't sound like I'm giving a direct answer to your question.

This is a phase of the anti-racism journey that a lot of white people go through, including myself, and I think OCD really heightens it. 

What really helped me is learning about the "15 Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture." Several of those align directly with OCD thought patterns, like Only One Right Way, Individualism, Either/Or Thinking. The culture operates on a purity focused mindset, which always always trickles down to individual purity, so everything feels like it's on your individual shoulders. 

This one’s hard because racism and OCD are a really tricky intersection!! Obviously the general OCD advice still applies - grounding, trying not to engage compulsions, no reassurance seeking, etc. But something that helped me understand the racism component more is accepting that everyone holds some racist beliefs because we live in a racist society. It’s certain that both you and I hold some racist beliefs or biases, and these do not make us Racists per se. Unlearning those biases is a journey everyone in society is on, but it’s even harder with OCD because there’s a common social belief that racism is a Moral Failing rather than a social pattern.

Idk if that helps you at all. But it helped me make sense of the dissonance between what was healthy for me (not moralizing having racist/biased beliefs) and what society - particularly White americans in my experience - tend to frame as a moral failing.

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I had a similar obsession a few years ago when I found out my views on transgender people were flawed. I had a huge breakdown and felt like I couldn’t recover, like I was an awful and bigoted person. After I calmed down, I wrote myself something in my notes app to try to help.

“You didn’t know, but now you do. You didn’t understand, but now you do. You aren’t a terrible person, you just didn’t understand. Nobody is hurt outside of hypotheticals. And you won’t do it again.”

I read it sometimes to try to calm myself down. I don’t know when I’ll realize my next harmful thoughts, but hopefully it won’t be as bad as the last time.