I hope you both don’t mind if I pop a note of thanks into this exchange for the specific thing you said here: “responsibility for maintaining a system”. This is so clear.
I pay attention to the ways in which my smaller actions actively maintain polluting systems, whether by not noticing or going along or settling for or other ways of doing it. Responsibility for maintaining racist systems is also something white people do with our smaller acts all the time. Keeping this front of mind today.