Yeah, I'm actually a closet self-hating racist who built a family with someone I despise. Plus took the time to learn their culture, values, and language; and live my life accordingly.
Sorry, but this is an intellectual lazy argument that undermines discourse.
Highlighting a close personal relationship like a marriage that spans cultures isn’t the same as the “some of my best friends are black” trope. It’s a useful context that implies a deeper understanding of differences between cultures and thinking.
I have nothing to add about restaurants, but I would illustrate this by my experience growing up in a traditional Irish Catholic family (2nd generation immigrants) and going to school with many first generation American born Chinese and Koreans. From my perspective, my classmates were cool and in alignment with the things that I cared about as an 80s kid, but at the same time reserved from an after school perspective.
As a grew older, I noticed some ways our families were similar, but the cultural differences were a big load on my friends. Many spoke no English at home and had to serve as universal translators for language and the cultural standards both ways. A few struggles with being an “outsider” in school and a decadent American in the eyes of extended family.
I bring this up because it’s easy to attribute to racism things that are better categorized as mutual misalignment of perspective and experience. Perhaps reflecting on how your implied characterization of the poster’s marriage would perhaps be hurtful or interpreted in a negative way would be a productive exercise.
The only reason the argument is somehow suspect, is because people can't say anything about a group of people that's not considered racist by some "professionally offended on behalf of others".
Anything negative I mean. They might be OK with 100% praise (though even that has been accused of "idealizing" and other BS by the "professionally offended on behalf of others").
So people saying e.g. "I'm not racist against X, I have X friends, but statistically X cause most of Y (a bad thing)" are considered racist and their qualifier is seen as bogus or hypocritical.
Even if statistically, according to accepted official numbers, X indeed cause most of Y.
We really need to put a cultural moratorium/ban on being offended on behalf of others.
I'm sure someone will pop up about how maybe the "others" are just too afraid to speak, but in practice I'm just not seeing that very often, but I am seeing a lot of people trying to basically culturally appropriate someone else's victimhood. And of course the people doing that are the most tedious and annoying spokespeople possible for whatever is being said.
What's worse is that most of these people do it for the because it's a fashion, harmless, gives you instant media credits.
In the days when it was most needed (in the segregation times, when gay and AIDS was a dirty word, etc) only people with balls supported those minorities, and those people could not care less about BS "politically correct" names and such.
Now, everybody and their dog support causes just because it's fashionable and scores them points.
Such opportunists are worse than active bigots -- if Nazi's where in fashion, they'd score points by being nazis.
Having friends or even being married to X is a good sign to prove one is not racist towards X.
The inverse idea, that this is somehow a bad argument, I can't even fathom how it started (and how messed the minds of those that think you must somehow be a racist if you make this argument are).
(Sure, one can claim it hypocritically, just like everything else -- that doesn't mean the claim itself signals racism).
There's no racism in claiming that quite a lot of the "Chinese" food one finds available in Europe is indeed quite dodgy.