I have to admit my boyfriend can be quite racist. His parents won't eat "funny food" like pasta, pizza, chinese, indian or basically anything "foreign". And his dad regularly insults the "f*ckin Pakis". Usually at this point I have to leave the room because I just can't stand to listen to it - and if I tell his Dad to stop being racist it turns into a horrible debate that I can never win.
Because he's been brought up that way my boyfriend can sometimes say racist things and almost not realise it. He has black friends and doesn't have a problem with black people in general - but sometimes his upbringing and ignorance shows and he can seem racist by trying too hard not to be if that makes sense?
Like comparing the picture quality between two TV's lately (which were showing sister act) he was like "oh, her skin looks blacker on that TV - wait, I can't say that can I?" and I was like "well why can't you say it if it's true?"
Also reverse racism is making more of an issue out of colour. For example an interview in the paper today with a black actress (can't remember who?) and they were asking how easy it was to find roles for black people in TV. You wouldn't ask a white person that. Highlighting skin colour in virtually any way seems totally pointless to me - it just doesn't matter.
At my primary school in a small country village there was one (adopted) black girl in the whole school and indeed the whole village - guess who was Mary in the navity play every year - not based on talent, there were better or equally good actors, but because the school wanted to be seen as being inclusive of race.
Totally different in the city my brother was at school at where a large proportion of his class were black, or asian, or polish or whatever and it just isn't an issue. Though now he's at private school in the same city and the school is predominantly white.
At my office Christmas meal at Uni I was the only "english" person out of the 8 people at my table. There were people from Iraq, Belgium, France, Czech, South America, China etc. Did anyone care? Nope. We did have fun dicussing cultural differences (in the Czech Republic they don't have christmas crackers) but there was no animosity or racism. The Chinese students at our Uni do tend to stick together, but thats more due to language barriers than racism.
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