You're totally ignoring or forgetting context. Which is that the green book exists because of the Jim Crow laws at the time, along with the general racism.

It's not remotely racist to stay away from white businesses when there is a certain possibility of service refusal, and a possibility that you might be assulted and killed. Hence the necessity of this book.

To say that his family was racist for not trusting white people with the books info, is to be totally ignorant (Tulsa is one example).

You have an extremely weird idea of racism that is not grounded in reality.

I'm a white lady who grew up in the south and yeah, I got absolutely no problems with black people not trusting us white folks. We've treated them like shit for a long-ass time.

That's a naive belief to have in practice. If you are part of a group that has been systematically oppressed by a different group because of your skin color, there is a valid correlation between trust and skin color. To think otherwise is... well... naive.

> Some people you can trust. Others you can't. This has no correlation with skin color.

That's the ideal, which I fully support, but tragically it is not at all the reality of people with black skin in the U.S.

> racist

In a small way, it's an interesting philosophical debate about semantics, but it has nothing to do with the very real, critical issue, which has caused centuries of suffering and oppression for millions of people. While we argue about words, they are in real pain.

I think this is less a correlation with skin color than culture, tradition, inertia and education (or lack thereof). It's demonstrably real, and why it takes decades or centuries to undo. The lasting inertia of institutional racism in the United States is pretty hard to ignore, though I've encountered my share of people who think it's all in the past.

"Trust" assumes a fair, even starting point.

It's not racist to assume that you can more safely trust other people that look like you, because most people are racist and are therefore less likely to betray the trust of someone who looks like them. There are sociology / anthropology / psychology experiments and studies and stuff if you look.