It’s always tricky isn’t it? There’s some beliefs that even as a product of the times you’d reject. The founding fathers who wanted to maintain slavery can be abhorred for it even today. At the same time you have someone like Lincoln, who said at one point that freed slaves should be sent to Liberia. We would certainly call that racist today.

I don’t think there’s a perfect, universal way to look at this, but it’s helpful to look at other contemporary beliefs. You had anti slavery advocates at the founding of the country, so it wasn’t impossible. This is difficult to do though when you have something like the New Deal that disproportionately helped white people, and no alternative to compare against.

What we can say with certainty is that interning Japanese Americans was wrong, and FDR had strong worker policies in spite of not being racially equitable.