I think the issue is that, were it not for everyone being forced to notice, everyone was defaulting to caring so little that we just used the people around us or who we had existing connections with (for demos, training data, employees... whatever), and everything was horribly biased due to numerous reasons. So, while before you weren't being forced to pay attention, everything was more racist than now, where you are being forced to actually make an effort to be anti-racist.
To put this into a programming metaphor, to me this is like being triggered by someone going out of their way to add a buffer overflow check due to a bunch of people spending the last decade screaming about buffer overflow security issues. Sure, before you didn't have to notice, but your code was probably also horribly insecure; now, everyone gets angry if you don't take at least minimal precautions, and people are even advocating that you use more secure languages from the start (to the point of questioning your architectural decisions if you don't), so you are being forced to pay attention--and sure, it seems a bit annoying and like extra work that a bunch of fanatics are foisting on you, and if someone had taken the time for their code to be secure before you might not have noticed (I mean, you weren't ever against security) but now it is screaming at you "this is because of those annoying security people rubbing our noses in our buffer overflows" so you get angry because this is taking time away from "getting the real work done" on your product--but the reality is that your code used to have glaring security issues that affected people who weren't you, and it sucked; everyone is better off for you paying attention now, and maybe one day we can fix the systemic problem and no one will have to put in such obvious effort to avoid being part of the problem, but we clearly aren't there yet. Being angry about this just comes off as not giving a shit about security: you didn't notice these checks before, because the code was just as good to you, for the criteria you were bothering to pay attention to, without the checks as it would have been with them, and the whole point is that that wasn't true... it was actually much worse; similarly, being angry about people making active efforts to have diversity in product advertising frankly just makes you come off as not giving a shit about minority representation :/.
To put this into a programming metaphor, to me this is like being triggered by someone going out of their way to add a buffer overflow check due to a bunch of people spending the last decade screaming about buffer overflow security issues. Sure, before you didn't have to notice, but your code was probably also horribly insecure; now, everyone gets angry if you don't take at least minimal precautions, and people are even advocating that you use more secure languages from the start (to the point of questioning your architectural decisions if you don't), so you are being forced to pay attention--and sure, it seems a bit annoying and like extra work that a bunch of fanatics are foisting on you, and if someone had taken the time for their code to be secure before you might not have noticed (I mean, you weren't ever against security) but now it is screaming at you "this is because of those annoying security people rubbing our noses in our buffer overflows" so you get angry because this is taking time away from "getting the real work done" on your product--but the reality is that your code used to have glaring security issues that affected people who weren't you, and it sucked; everyone is better off for you paying attention now, and maybe one day we can fix the systemic problem and no one will have to put in such obvious effort to avoid being part of the problem, but we clearly aren't there yet. Being angry about this just comes off as not giving a shit about security: you didn't notice these checks before, because the code was just as good to you, for the criteria you were bothering to pay attention to, without the checks as it would have been with them, and the whole point is that that wasn't true... it was actually much worse; similarly, being angry about people making active efforts to have diversity in product advertising frankly just makes you come off as not giving a shit about minority representation :/.