to think my 5yo ds is not racist?

[chr0nic]

Today the teacher phoned to tell me my 5 yo ds had called another boy 'little Indian boy' . My son was made to apologise but not made to understand why it was wrong. The teacher phoned the other boy's parents and so did I to apologise. I tried to explain to the boy's mother that my ds did not mean to be racist and does not understand the concept of racism. She did not accept this at all. Now she has banned my ds from playing with her ds. I feel sorry for my ds. Am I being too pfb? Should I have tackled this issue at an earlier age to prevent this from happening? What now?

The problem is anything that could be construed as racist has to be taken very seriously...and schools can feel pressurised and maybe the teacher had never dealt with anything like this before and over reacted..
DD1 (mixed race) at 6 came home upset ... DP (arabic) was furious...a boy in her class had been calling her the 'odd one out' after in a self portrait class at school the art teacher had singled out DD1 as 'different' (all other children in class were white). I phoned the school to find out what had happened ...and was amazed on how seriously and quickly it was dealt with - the head teacher phoned at gone 5.30pm to tell me the teacher concerned's version...
What had happened was the teacher was talking about skin tone and DD had put her hand up to say she was 'special' and 'lucky' because she had such a beautiful colour of skin (my fault! luckily I don't think she added that most white people spend a fortune on fake tan etc to get skin her colour...) -the teacher had said she should use more brown for her skin tone - obviously the boy was reacting to her boasting...I didn't think it was racist...but even so I had the option of making a formal complaint, getting it investigated as a racist incident, getting the boy's parents involved etc etc...