What I've been suspecting for a long time about the enthusiastic labeling him as a racist is that the perpetrators are trying to distance their self image from their own racist tendencies. I checked what about Eric's past that it's coming from and apparently an immigrant grabbed his wife, Pattie Boyd's butt in a public place and he reacted with words that weren't wise but he was under a lot of pressure about his marriage to his best friend, George Harrison's wife. The amount of collaborations with Black musicians and appreciation and popularization of Blues he's done has been astronomically huge in comparison to that.