What you seem to be asking for is a definition of racism. Something to make acts of “real” racism distinct from similar but unrelated behaviors.
What racism is
I’ve always found racism is best understood as a label for a family of logical fallacies. Specifically, fallacies that produce invalid and unsound conclusions about race. This is to suggest that when someone concludes something like:
All Chinese eat broccoli
Jim is Chinese
Therefore, Jim must like broccoli.
They are committing what I find to be definable as a racist fallacy. You’ll notice that the fallacy doesn’t have to be malicious, though it certainly can be. Racism is a matter of making ignorant mistakes in our thought processes that produces ill conclusions in government, corporate as well as personal decisions. These fallacious conclusions can often be quite harmless but can often lead to outright segregation, abuse, and sometimes even murder in society.
What racism isn’t
It’s easy to fallaciously conclude sometimes that some statements or arguments are racist when they actually aren’t. I hold that race related conclusions that are actually correct cannot be counted as “racist” since they lack the aformentioned and necessary ignorance and/or logical mistake to make them such. For example, if an african man with dark skin decides that he won’t wear sunscreen on a day with a medium-high uv index. He’s not making a mistake when he concludes that he likely won’t suffer sunburn. When a man enters a “Traditional German Food” restaurant and orders a schnitzel without looking at the menu, he’s not making an ignorant suggestion and hence not a racist one even if the restaurant doesn’t happen to serve schnitzels.
In short I would say racism requires verifiable mistakes in logic (fallacies) in the race related conclusions that are drawn.