It also, generally, makes you much less safe to actually confront when you do inevitably fuck up and do some kind of racism, such as being scared of being around PoC for the above reasons. Because you're so wound up and tense that it becomes this Big Catastrophic Failure and your Worst Fears Realized, which immediately takes the conversation away from the racism and instead collapses it around your feelings as the offender.
This is an example of an intersection of white fragility with white guilt, both of which are ways in which white people deflect the responsibility of examining their own racist biases or actions by weaponizing their feelings to keep the conversation about them and their feelings, either by getting defensive about accusations of racism or imploding with self-flagellation and guilt for being Such A Terrible Person.
The thing about being raised white in the US, europe, and canada, is that the society you grew up in will inevitably instill subconscious racist biases in you, directly or indirectly. Even the most leftist white spaces are rife with racist tendencies, many of which stem from absences, rather than overt presence of denegrating opinions of PoC. Like ignorance to the breadth and nature of the struggles of BIPoC, the nuances of systemic racism, where assumptions of equal opportunity and saftey in a given scenario break down.
If you want to actually be an effective anti-racist, it needs to be easy and safe to tell you "hey, that was racist" without you imploding, exploding, getting defensive, or centering your guilt. Don't make it a bigger deal than the person approaching you has made it, keep the apology short and sweet, and keep the load off of whoever aproached you to correct your error; that is your responsibility to fix and your responsibility to manage your emotions about, not the victim of your racist behavior.
Like all things in life, you need to be willing to make a little bit of an ass of yourself if you want to get better. You need to get comfortable being wrong, being the bad guy. Because sooner or later, you will be, and you can't let it be the end of the world. Because it never is, but treating it like one forces everyone else to save you from whatever personal apocalypse you've spun up over it. And when you've fucked up or hurt someone, it is always the wrong time to make yourself need rescue first.
You can come back from a faux pas, even a Racist one. You just need to chill the fuck out and listen.
