There are shades of racism. At the extreme racist end, there are those who genuinely and explicitly believe that dark skin makes you a worthless scum. At the other end, there are people who feel, at a gut level, that skin colour is irrelevant. Between the two, there are people who will infer various things from skin colour, such as the propensity to crime, IQ, or whatever.

The sad fact is, a correct assessment of reality is racist to some extent. Not because of skin colour, mind you, but because of confounding factors such as income, or self-fulfilling prophecies such as racism itself. Correlation is not causation, but the correlation is still there, and we can still draw inferences from them.

As for my personal assessment of the credibility of this story, I assumed the guy was white to begin with. If I believed he was black, I would have been like "of course", and marked off the story as even more credible. Because I have this stereotype in my head about police being racist. I'm now wondering to what extent this is actually true…

Jesse Jackson said this: “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Does that mean he is a racist?