Do you think maybe being from "one of the whitest states" is why the people you know still track their descent so carefully? I've lived all over North America, and your experience definitely doesn't match up with anywhere I've lived. Which is not to invalidate your experience, but I would strongly caution you against assuming it's the norm. Most people I knew when I was still in the US pretty much settled on a color or just plain "American" for anything past about the third generation.
Using a color descriptor like "white" or "black" isn't inherently racist for those who don't care so much about which boats all our very distant relatives were on hundreds of years ago, and it definitely doesn't preclude empathy for those who are different from us.
You said you want good faith discussions, but you preemptively dismissed one of the biggest answers because you don't think it's a good solution. Then you have people here disagreeing with you, explaining why, and pointing to examples of it being done successfully, and you continue to completely dismiss a donation as nothing more than a "thank you" - how is this in any way a good faith discussion if any opposing viewpoint is immediately met with this kind of "YOU'RE the problem" response?
I do understand your frustration in those cases in which donations fail, but it seems like you're not willing to meet us halfway and acknowledge that sometimes, donations succeed, and not by accident or luck. There's data there - test cases we could be picking apart and seeing what critical mass needs to be reached before an instance can reliably secure donations and what we can do for admins until their instances reach that threshold. But you're just dismissing it as nonviable even though it clearly works for a lot of places.
That is not good faith.