Can you tell whether it's elevating and not racist to compare Black Lives Matter artists to cavemen?

I'm trying to read "New York’s Sidewalk Prophets Are Heirs of the Lascaux Cave Artisans/What street art adorning boarded-up storefronts tells us about our shared political realities and the ways our stories are connected. A critic’s tour deciphers the signs and symbols" in the New York Times.

Maybe to answer my question you need to know more about the racial identification of the writer, whose name is Seph Rodney. I'm just going to give you a sample of the prose:

What became apparent to me is that in the intervening millenniums between those cave paintings and the killing of George Floyd, the messages we share, like the sociopolitical circumstance that impel them, have become more complex. Now street artists take account of the qualified legal immunity protecting police officers, the Black Lives Matter movement and the ramifications of a dysfunctional democracy, among other realities, using a well-developed visual language of cultural memes that illustrate the ideological battles among regional, racial and cultural factions. When we see the image of thin, green-skinned, bipedal beings with teardrop-shaped black apertures for eyes, we typically read “alien.” But when I see the image of such a creature holding a sign that reads “I can’t breathe,” I grok an urgent message: Even aliens visiting from light years away understand the plight of Black people in the United States because this situation is so obviously dire.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jamie said:

I stopped processing his prose before he said "grok," but woke back up when I got there. I hate when people who aren't Heinlein use "grok" to connote their deep understanding... Those people almost invariably missed the point of Stranger In a Strange Land.

The OED has an entry for "grok" — U.S. slang, "arbitrary formation" by Robert A. Heinlein, from 1961. It is defined as "To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with" or " To empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment." The 2 quotes from the book that are in the OED are: "Smith had been aware of the doctors but had grokked that their intentions were benign" and "Now that he knew himself to be self he was free to grok ever closer to his brothers." The OED also gives these quotes:

1968 Playboy June 80 He met her at an acid-rock ball and she grokked him, this ultracool miss loaded with experience and bereft of emotion.

"Sounds like Hugh Hefner's place," said Meade, when I read the quote out loud and without any context at all — no reference to time or place or what I was researching.

1968 T. Wolfe Electric Kool-aid Acid Test vi. 86 Instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made..as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing.

I read that one out loud and Meade guessed "Tom Wolfe." He's grokking well this morning!!

Did Seph Rodney misuse the word "grok"? I don't think so, but Jamie didn't say he misused the word. She said/implied that he missed the point of "Stranger In a Strange Land." I read that book half a century ago, so I can't say I remember the point, even as "grok" lives on in the language.

ADDED: I'm reading the Wikipedia entry for "Stranger in a Strange Land." We're told "The book significantly influenced modern culture in a variety of ways":

Church of All Worlds

A central element of the second half of the novel is the religious movement founded by Smith [the main character, a human who was born on Mars and raised by Martians, then comes to Earth, with his Martian ways], the "Church of All Worlds", an initiatory mystery religion blending elements of paganism and revivalism, with psychic training and instruction in the Martian language. In 1968, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (then Tim Zell) founded the Church of All Worlds, a Neopagan religious organization modeled in many ways after the fictional organization in the novel. The spiritual path included several ideas from the book, including polyamory, non-mainstream family structures, social libertarianism, water-sharing rituals, an acceptance of all religious paths by a single tradition, and the use of several terms such as "grok," "Thou art God," and "Never Thirst."

Heinlein objected to Zell's lumping him with other writers such as Ayn Rand and Robert Rimmer; Heinlein felt that those writers used their art for propaganda purposes, while he simply asked questions of the reader, expecting each reader to answer for him- or herself. He wrote to Zell in a letter: "... each reader gets something different out of the book because he himself supplies the answers. If I managed to shake him loose from some prejudice, preconception or unexamined assumption, that was all I intended to do."...

I would therefore ask Jamie whether her demand for proper understanding of "Stranger in a Strange Land" is itself a misunderstanding of "Stranger in a Strange Land."

Grok

The word "grok," coined in the novel, made its way into the English language. In Heinlein's invented Martian language, "grok" literally means "to drink" and figuratively means "to comprehend," "to love," and "to be one with." The word rapidly became common parlance among science fiction fans, hippies, and later computer programmers and hackers,[ and has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

For my list of things without which we would not have had hippies.

Fair Witness

The profession of Fair Witness, invented for the novel, has been cited in such varied contexts as environmentalism, psychology, technology, digital signatures, and science, as well as books on leadership, and Sufism. A Fair Witness is an individual trained to observe events and report exactly what is seen and heard, making no extrapolations or assumptions. When in the Fair Witness uniform of a white robe, they are presumed to be observing and opining in their professional capacity. Works that refer to the Fair Witness emphasize the profession's impartiality, integrity, objectivity, and reliability.

An example from the book illustrates the role of Fair Witness when Anne is asked what color a house is. She answers, "It's white on this side." The character Jubal then explains, "You see? It doesn’t occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King’s horses couldn’t force her to commit herself...unless she went there and looked – and even then she wouldn’t assume that it stayed white after she left.”

Now, I have a great assignment for my seminar on reading comprehension: You are a Fair Witness and you accompanied Seph Rodney on his tour of the murals that he described in his article. Write your article — that is, rewrite Rodney's article consistent with the practice of a Fair Witness.

Waterbed

Stranger in a Strange Land contains an early description of the waterbed, an invention that made its real-world debut in 1968. Charles Hall, who brought a waterbed design to the United States Patent Office, was refused a patent on the grounds that Heinlein's descriptions in Stranger in a Strange Land and another novel, Double Star (1956), constituted prior art.

I just love that.