What happened to shades of gray?

Lately all this talk about TV tokenism has got me thinking about what we in our "politically correct" society consider to be racist or prejudice. I feel that when looking at something like tokenism, people tend to see things in a very definite, yes or no, manner. For example in response to the question is TV tokenism a problem? You could say that yes it is, because it shows that people in a minority group(Racial minorities, homosexuals, women..)are all interchangeable, and that it encourages people to see the group label and not the person. However you could also argue that tokenism ensures that people from minority groups that might normally be passed over are getting on TV, and that it is a step toward minorities having a more central role on TV. So, I think there are always more than one side to issues of prejudice, but that often people are so worried about saying anything that could make them sound prejudice that they look for some definite, black and white argument to prove that they're not. For example I've over heard someone say, "I'm not racist I've got lots of black friends." This statement could be interpreted in a number of different ways. You could say, the fact that they are talking about their views of a few individuals to represent their views of all African Americans is racist because it's talking about those friends as a group, and not as individual people. Or this could be seen as the racial differences don't matter to this person, he's friends with these people because he likes them as people. Now I'm not saying one point is right and one is wrong, I'm simply saying that we need to see things from different perspectives, and not see things in such deffininte terms.