The underlying assumption is that a person lives in an isolated, atomistic universe, and ignores cultural influences and indoctrination; that is, racism is a choice and if one doesn't will it, one can stop being one. For a social scientist, particularly an anthropologist, I find this assumption surprising. Would you care to explain further?

There's plenty of research on interracial identification (work by Loftus, among others) that indicates a difficulty for people of *any* race to tell apart people from another race. Most of this work is done in connection with forensic psychology and eye-witness identification, and it is one of the main reasons why lineups often fail when the identifying witness is from a different race than that of the alleged perpetrator.

It's an issue of cognition, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with racist values or perceptions.