I'm not sure if you can train racism away that you've learned since you were little.
I don't know. I think you can if you really want to change your perspective. I speak from experience.
Since I was a little boy, I was told that people from the Middle East (Persian, Indian, Arab, etc, etc), were dirty, evil, and terrorists. I grew up watching movies, television shows, and news reports that reinforced that notion that people from the Middle East were bad and shouldn't be trusted. I carried that prejudice with me well into high school and beyond. Then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 19. Los Angeles is beautifully diverse. I met people from all over the world, all over the country, and from all walks of life. Rich, poor, and everything in between. I met and learned about the people that I had harbored racist and bigoted views about, and realized that I was horribly, shamefully wrong. From that day forward, I worked really hard to rid myself of those prejudices. I then applied that work to everyone else I harbored fear/distrust of, including fellow black people (even among the black community, we are susceptible to the demonizing and dehumanization of black people). I admit, I used to tense up and feel uncomfortable when a group of black men would be walking towards me as I walked down the street. As I got older I began to recognize where that fear was coming from; the notion that black men are dangerous and untrustworthy. That a group of them are probably a gang, or drug dealers, or "thugs" (ie, "niggers"), and I should beware. I'm a black man, afraid of my own people. Shameful.
It took years, and a lot of work for me to shed my prejudices, but here's the thing: I'm still working at it to this day. I catch myself when I'm slipping into those old stereotypes and generalizations. When I see a beared man with a turban, or his wife in a hijab walking down the street, I don't immediately think "terrorist. be afraid." I look them in the eye, smile, say "hello," (which they return both in kind), and go about my business. I don't tense up anymore when I see my people coming my way. Me, a 37 year old civilian, is able to train himself to not racially profile another human being because of the color of his skin, but a professional police officer can't? That's bullshit.
I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I'm not ashamed of how I became a better person in terms of racial prejudice because I recognized it and worked to rid myself of it. The problem is that this fucking country has a hard god damned time recognizing that it's racist as fuck, and needs to change. It seems like we've subscribed to the "Ostrich Defense Technique" strategy when it comes to racism in America. It exists. It's ugly and damaging. It's affecting the lives of everyone in this country, white America included. And it needs to stop. But it won't until we admit there is a problem and work
together to address it. Too many people don't want to take personal responsibility for their world view and say, "You know what, maybe I am prejudiced and biased against XYZ (XYZ can be anything from Blacks, Asians, Mexicans, etc, to Muslims, Gays, Lesbians, and the rest of the LGBT community; related aside, I also had a prejudice against gays growing up. It's another prejudice I shed after moving to Los Angeles)."
Admitting you have racist thoughts/feelings doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you aware of your own issues as a human being. I'm certainly ashamed that I had those feelings in the past, but I'm proud that I was able to overcome them with a lot of work and real world experience confronting why I felt the way I did, and fixing it. The least the people who are sworn to Protect and Serve us can do is try to one up a 37 year old artist from Los Angeles when it comes to race relations.