My daughter has a touch of social anxiety to this day, which can be totally attributed to an incident when a girl in her school labelled her racist in front of the whole class (made a major drama out of it) because she innocently said in the library when they were reading that a girl in a book looked like the girl.
Queue the “you are racist, don’t you know it’s racist to say all black people look the same” comment and telling the teacher and whole class stopping and dealing with it. She was only 11.
A completely innocent comment led to one huge drama with teachers involved, with us having to go to the school to sort it out and stuff. The teachers didn’t deal with it very well either, swayed more in the favour of the girl.
She now can’t handle being the point of attention, things like reading out loud in class etc or if there’s any situation where all eyes could be on her, she freaks out. Even years later. Was never like that before.
Its not right what Beardsley said to a black guy. That’s an obvious racist remark.
But Noelle has a good point that there are times when people can innocently say something and it’s construed as racist.