Someone claiming to be a racist, but saying they are not prejudiced. What do you think?

They are talk out their ass.

I think that they don’t know what words mean.

More likely the explanation is that the person views their racism as justified and therefore without prejudice. @dappled leaves is right.

I see no reason why this can’t be so. Racism does not have to imply a belief in the superiority of one’s own race, only that one wants it to be segregated from other races. I’ll grant that this is not the common view, but it’s a possible view.

To illustrate with a simplistic example: It’s sort of like kids at Thanksgiving who want only the white meat of the turkey. They may know nothing about the dark meat – may never even have consciously tried it or had any knowledge of it other than to know that it exists – but they only want the breast slices. No other metaphors should be read into that example. It only has to do with menu choices when it comes to poultry at a family meal.

I don’t have to have any negative opinion of other races whatsoever to only want to deal with members of my own race.

On the other hand, when I hear hoofbeats, I think “horses”, and not “zebras”, so I fully understand the equivalence that the views share: prejudice certainly does closely correlate with racism.

Chances are they are prejudiced. Racism is about pre-judging all the members of a group based on some characteristic they share like skin color rather than on their merit as individuals or on their actions.

They may be thinking of prejudice as unwarranted bias/judgement. If they’ve convinced themself that their racism somehow is warranted—which I guess they must have—how abhorrent people still think this way—they may be trying to draw that distinction between their “justified” position and prejudiced ones. They may also being trying to separate themself from the negative connotations attached to prejudice—but that seems like wasted effort if they’re sticking with racism.