Great comment. The problem is that Americans remain provincial. At least today we have a rainbow of ethnicities and immigrant experiences instead of the the mostly black-and-white view of a century ago, but still, very few Americans have lived abroad and understand that these sorts of interactions are normal. Everywhere. Being half-black and light-skinned, I got to hear all kinds of stuff in my many years in Russia, but the assumptions about me were about my being Western. Russians also tend now to accumulate and exaggerate grievances — just look at Putin’s recent article about the “Munich Betrayal”. Blame games don’t have happy outcomes.
We need people with perspectives outside the black-white dimension to speak up, but I fear that the current environment is not a safe one for civil discourse.