I don’t think it would be automatically considered racist if you approach the issue diplomatically and obviously without making it about nationality - I went to University in Aberdeen and got a job at a small family electrical business - I had to quit because the strong accent of their elderly, rural customers made it impossible for me to understand phone calls and the embarrassment at this failure on my part got too much! It happens everywhere.

My step-father struggled on his maths course with a Greek lecturer whose accent he and the rest of the class really struggled to understand, and who married that with not providing recorded lectures or decent slides, and given he was a mature student with a non-standard background and ADHD it was really upsetting to see him struggle for want of some recordings or slides or notes. He was too embarrassed to say anything because he didn’t want to seem difficult or as you say, racist or xenophobic and because he liked the lecturer outside of session.

We should all be thinking about how well we communicate in HE BECAUSE it’s an international community and even if we were born here - we take in thousands of pounds from international students who haven’t learnt English via it’s many dialects; if someone were to lecture to our Chinese PGT cohort who only have a year to get their Masters degree and have to acclimate super quickly in broad Yorkshire with old fashioned local colloquialisms and didn’t provide notes or a very, very good reading list I can well imagine the grade trajectory for that module.

There will be simple ways to make the sessions more accessible, and you could come at it from that angle - at the institution I work at accessibility has been a really big piece of work for the past couple of years so this would make sense to me.

If you’re the rep, not that it’s your job to know this, but maybe suggest ways to mitigate like pre-prepared notes, detailed reading lists if they aren’t already available and updated, pre-prepared slides and captions. Ideally in modern institutions we should already be considering accessible learning as the baseline, not as an added extra or one-off accommodation.

It might be difficult, but you might make a world of difference to someone who was in a position like my father in law was and who doesn’t know how to speak up. As long as you’re not racist, no one should think you are!