Is racism often just a matter of perception?

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I recently saw part of a programme called black/white where a family of each type was apparently disguised as a family of the other type in order to experience the different lifestyles. The real african american and the pseudo african american man were walking down a narrow pathway, some people coming towards them were walking 3 abreast and then changed to single file as the men approached them. The real guy said the people did this to avoid him, the pretend one said it was just courtesy. Shortly afterwards they went into a shop to look at some shirts, a service person quickly came over to assist them, the real guy said this was done as the shop assistant thought they might be shoplifters, the pretend guy say it was just good customer service. So in this case the same actions were perceived in different ways. Is it possible that many cases of so called racism are just a misunderstanding between 2 types of people e.g. if the group of people who moved over or the salesman had also been african american how would their actions have been interpreted?