trying hard not to be perceived as racist

Being the best person you can be without comparison and feeling the need to shake off the baggage you think others have saddled you with. I saw too many try hards coming to the bush from the enlightened liberal value universities and cities wanting to establish their goodness and enlightenment among the aboriginal people of outback Australia as if the rest of us were unenlightened bogans. Big mistake. If you have to build yourself up by knocking your ancestry or cultural heritage down then you misunderstand the nature of racism. All you are doing is hiding your embarrassment by big noting yourself in comparison to others. You end up a relativist rather than an absolutist.
Racism is about attributing socially relevant traits such as manners, human relationships etc to people on the basis of physically and other irrelevant traits such as skin colour or religion or gender etc.
The harder you try to be not perceived as racist, the more you miss the point of trying to be the best person you can be. This is what being absolute is about. When you try to be the best person you can be then you do not make the mistake of patronising the very people you are trying hard to demonstrate your non racism to. Patronising itself is a form of racism because it sees the other as different rather than as a person.