Most things in life are not simplistic black/white decisions, whereby bad outcomes occurred because the people themselves were bad.

Doing anything results in trade-offs. Some trade-offs are worse than others, and some have horrible consequences, like deaths of many, but writing off the decision as a racist one implies malicious intent, which ignores the potentially real decisions that were being made.

For others reading this thread, parents seems to be referring to the Bengal Famine of 1943. Wiki has a decent summary, but it again demonstrates the circumstances and trade-offs that were made. Was it a good outcome? Famine and death certainly isn't. But was it done maliciously out of "racism"? Some scholars claim so, but often these are the same scholars who see everything through a lens of racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#1942%E2%...