it makes it clear why they were muted

How does providing a list of people who have muted a post creator make it clear why someone was muted? I don't see that at all here.

it also allows the community to call to task those who are muting unnecessarily

Yeah, if someone in the community tried to tell me they didn't approve with my use of the mute function, I would tell them "Too bad."

those who are muting unnecessarily

I don't understand why this is a community issue. The community absolutely does not have line of sight into every interaction with every user. It is therefore impossible for the community to actually know who is "muting unnecessarily" without first seeking an explanation for the person who has muted the other person. We wouldn't just be able to pick up on that with background knowledge. In addition, the community has no line of sight into private communications that may cause a person to be muted - there's IRC and PMing, both of which could become sites of conflict that other users wouldn't witness but may cause a given user to think "I don't want to talk to this person any more."

Asking a muter to explain why they have muted someone is pure drama fodder. I am against drama on Hubski. Why is it drama fodder? Well, especially if negative interactions have happened in private conversations, you're now giving the muted person the chance to lie or throw their own accusations into the mix. I'm thinking specifically about things like personal harassment. This would become a thread of heated emotions and back-and-forth. What good would that do hubski?

(for the record, I'm also a minority who identified myself as such in the post).

Big deal, you can be a minority and have racist viewpoints. "I have black friends, I'm not racist." Neither of these statements means anything in reference to whether a person is racist. You can be a woman and sexist, that's a generally easy concept to follow, so I think it should be simple to extrapolate and realize that skin tone doesn't automatically grant you a "Not racist" card.