Yeah but cultural genocide (ethnocide) doesn’t refer to just kill off parts of a culture. It’s a systemic approach, usually backed by law, to destroy the entire ethnicity and cultural norms.
Take for example what the Canadian government calls the cultural genocide of indigenous people in Canada. Their intention was not to kill the parts of indigenous culture that they didn’t like, but it was forced assimilation through legal action and through removing children from their culture. It was remove/ban/destroy all indigenous culture - very “kill the Indian and save the man”. That is cultural genocide.
In your example, the “destruction” of racism in American culture was not led by a government and not led against any ethnic group directly. Nobody was taking Confederate kids away from their family to teach them the “right” way.
Yes cultures change and adapt, but ethnocide is the very intentional move to do everything possible to destroy that culture. Will it adapt? Sure, yes, indigenous cultures have been extremely resilient and survived in Canada. but to say that it wasn’t cultural genocide is to ignore the fact that children were literally ripped from their families in order to stop them from practicing their culture, or that cultural meetings and even just any type of meeting within their own groups was outlawed.
Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.
That’s a quote from our first prime minister. That is what I mean when I say cultural genocide.
Cultural genocide is intentional. And much of the time, as I mentioned before, it is a facet of violent genocide because it leads to deaths and multigenerational trauma. Even if the government wasn’t going in and killing people en masse and intentionally - which is how genocide is technically defined - there’s no way that this is not a type of genocide.