For me, “race card” had one meaning. if a black individual had done something clearly wrong and then claim but they were only being criticized for it because they were black, I called that ‘playing the race card.“ The two most obvious examples were Bill Cosby comparing himself to Emmett Till, and Clarence Thomas saying he was a victim of a “high-tech lynching“. However, the examples described by black writers I have read are usually very different from this. Apparently when most white people use the term “race card“ in conversations with Black people, they mean mentioning race for any reason whatsoever. It is not playing the race card, as I understand the term, to ask someone to take the confederate flag logo off their desk at work, for example. That’s an honest expression of pain and anger, and a request for a courteous acknowledgment of that pain and anger. So yeah, it looks like the term has to go. it’s apparently degenerated into a simple excuse to silence Black people. It’s a little like what happened to the expression “mansplaning” which used to mean something very specific and important, and now pretty much just refers to any man expressing his opinion about anything.