There's a parallel in Maus, where the PoV character runs increasingly into his Holocaust survivor's father's racism, even as he explores his father's threading the needle of 20th century Central Europe[1] . He calls his pa out on it, but for his pa the schwarzers aren't people, so there's no "there" there.

If Speigelman had a slightly deeper historical insight he might have drawn the connection between the byzantine precision of American race law and what Hitler had hoped to accomplish in his own "Wild West". Both end products of the secular wave of colonialism, with Hitler's being at least a hundred years too late, held back by the late stage of German nationhood.

Suffering is no guarantor of virtue. Extremes of violence can brutalize not just individuals but entire peoples. Which is why we should not look to victims as prima facie exemplars, but with empathy and deeper understanding.

[1] the "Bloodlands" of Tim Snyder