Perhaps that’s where the discomfort arises: I read once before that it’s rooted in whether you think someone IS a criminal or DOES something criminal.

If I believe that being called a racist means that I am permanently given a label, that it is an immutable character judgment, and I will be shunned if I am given that label, then I will be very offended if someone tries to give me that label.

If I believe that, even if if my behaviour might be deemed “normal” or even “politically correct”, there is plenty I don’t know, and I may have unintentionally hurt others’ feelings, contributed to situations that hindered them or simply failed to help in the right way, then I don’t feel personally condemned by that label.

It’s honestly hard for me to believe that I have never unintentionally hurt another person through my actions or inactions, either by paying too much or too little attention to their ethnicity.

In fact, I know for definite that I have: 25 years ago, I indignantly said that I couldn’t possibly be racist because my close friend was black, while failing to understand that we were close because she dressed like me and acted like me. I protested that to someone else who I rejected, not because she was black but because she wasn’t part of my very specific subculture, and I couldn’t understand that her experiences would have led her to believe it was racially motivated.

I really hurt her without meaning to, without understanding why, and assuming that our experiences and opportunities were the same.

So, yes, I am racist. It’s a horrifying thought, but part of this privilege is that we get to absorb that shock from a position of unjust power.

The only thing I can do now is to shut up and listen. You don’t guilt, emote, blame or outrage your way out of racist behaviours; you just learn and change.