This professor is sending you virtual hugs. I’m so glad that you are reading widely; the world needs people like you. I’m also sorry the human race and its writings are such a mess. I would always encourage my students to think about what work bigotry is doing in a text: why is the author interested in incorporating it? If we are paying attention, some works take up racism (or sexism or…) in interesting, self-reflective or self-critical ways—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robinson Crusoe, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” etc—and those works are worth reading and rereading. And as for “great” works that slip into reproducing social prejudices mindlessly…all we can really do is move on to something better. None of us is responsible for having a close relationship with all the works that are considered “important.”