No I don’t think she’s being racist. It’s just her preference and we’re all entitled to that. However, I cannot help but think if a white person had expressed similar sentiments there may have been a different reaction:
“I love my black family but there’s an elegant joy in a room full of white faces”
Or
“The power of being surrounded by white people is that the sheer sense of community is enough”
Or
“I was adopted into a black family, lived and went to school in a place where mine was the only white face for miles…”
But of course I forgot that no white person has ever felt isolated and the odd one out in a black community have they?
I must say I similarly lost the will to live after a few paragraphs of Ms Carroll's ramblings. But what I did read left me a little puzzled. Er…why did she marry a white man? Why did she pursue a career that was so dominated by white people? Why did she choose to live in an area where predominantly white people live? She may not have had any say about her adoptive parents but she certainly was able to choose who to marry.
Unfortunately, andy, lots of people don’t like other people for all sorts of reasons. Some of these are well founded, some of them are, as you point out, the results of prejudice. But what annoys me is that this characteristic is only ever mentioned of white people. But as it happens, as some white people do not like black people, some black people do not like white people. And it doesn’t stop there. Many (I would go as far as to say most) black people from the Caribbean do not like Africans. More importantly as far as this topic goes, many of them are not fond of black Americans. Many Asians are not fond of Africans. Many Indians despise Bangladeshis. Bangladeshis are not fond of Pakistanis (a word which I'd be surprised to see pass muster under AB’s censorship). Many Africans don’t like other Africans because they are from another African nation. Almost all of these dislikes are reciprocated. If these dislikes amount to racism then it’s rife across the races and nationalities. But we seem to only ever to hear of white racists.