This actually happened to me at my father’s funeral. All of us kids were sitting around the table with the preist and something came up, and my sister blurted out, ‘Oh, yeah, he was racist.’ No, he wasn’t, I corrected her. I really felt I had to defend him. He might not use the right PC words and he might describe a nurse as being ‘coloured’, but he would NEVER refuse care from her. I also had a boy friend (not really a romantic one, he was a friend, but he lived far away and I never got to see him, so the relationship never went anywhere, but it was a crush, for sure.) but he was black and after the first few seconds of meeting him, you could see him blink for a second, but my Dad just said he was a good-looking kid and smiled at me. (he was gorgeous….) Of course, my sister only ever heard Dad tell bad jokes… and they were even about his own background, for heavens sake, with Polish jokes (His grandmother was 100% Polish hahaha). She never heard him tell stories about his time in the Merchant Navy where he worked side by side with buddies from all walks of life and passed the bottle around in a circle of characters when he was in port and visited with a friend’s family from Harlem.
I have seen a white woman refuse care from a black nurse because she was black. Same thing happened to a black doctor I know. THAT is racist. I believe there is malice, ignorance and fear behind racism. Ignorance leads only to being culturally insensitive, and it can usually be quickly fixed by a sincere apology.