[ on being friends with legit racists and bigots ]

I have no problem being friends with people whose views are different. It's would be awfully boring to hang around with people who agreed on everything.
What matters is if we can respect each others position without agreeing with it and if we can agree to disagree and drop it.

Deal breakers for me are things I view as character flaws or worse.

I found out a co-worker and friend of a friend was a child molester. I couldn't even look at him let alone talk to him. Deal breaker.
When a 'friend' asked me to look up the symptoms of mesothelioma so he knew what to say to the doctor, he was always looking for a law suit to set him up for life. Deal breaker.
People who try to get on disability

There's the kind of prejudice that makes people afraid to drive into certain neighborhoods or make eye contact with certain people. I think all of us have this kind of prejudice, and it's not necessarily mapped onto racism.

However, I'm kind of sick of racism and sexism being likened to political differences. If someone thinks an entire group of people are animals and they are bold enough to make this known to others, then they deserve to be shunned and shamed. It is perfectly fine to be intolerant of this kind of intolerance.

I'm personally struggling with this because the aforementioned friend of mine was so bold. The way she was talking, she might as well have called me an animal. Now, I'm not a perfect saint and I really try to give people the benefit of the doubt. But I'm not obligated to forgive people just because otherwise they're decent. There are flaws and then there are defects. Everyone has the former, but not everyone has the latter.

I can be friendly with just about anyone, because I know how to be fake and phony while keeping my true feelings secret. But being friends is a different matter. The average black person spends much of their 9-5 playing the good ambassador and not going off on the ignorant racist assholes in their midst. But when they are with friends, they should be abe to relax and not worry about "playing nice" for the sake of racial harmony.

Saying "nobody's perfect" with regard to befriending racists...this sounds like something only a person with limited experience with racism and bigoty would be able say with a straight face.

Maybe it's different being white?
I have a black friend who will quite often go off on white people, how we are no good, how we are haters but hide it, how we are the devil incarnate. After a while I'll look at him and say 'uh excuse me but'. He'll give me a blank look and then he realizes I am white and says, 'well you're different, you know what I mean, it's not all white people, you're one of the okay ones'.
I'll say, 'uh huh I see'.
Then we laugh and move on to something else.
I know he doesn't really hate white people, I know he's venting, I know it's about racism and sometimes he lumps all of us white folk together even though he knows not all whites are racist.