No, I don't think he was ever a real racist, but I think he came to the conclusion a long time ago that all white Southerners are.
There is a disconnect in his thinking somewhere, though -- and his brilliance in nuclear engineering, which was good enough to get him into Admiral Rickover's nuclear surface-ship program (where the second-string went who didn't go into the submarine service), doesn't translate to people smarts and people skills. People with an IQ of 150 in academic subjects can act as if they've got IQ's south of 90 when it comes to dealing with people, that's a pretty conventional insight.
So I think Carter's breaking off another really astute non-insight with his maunderings about people.
One, if all whites are racist, based on Carter's observation of them in the 1950's, then why aren't all blacks, who used to manage whites' perceptions of them by playing dumb-as-a-stump "Sambo" games for about 300 years and speaking as if they had room-temperature IQ's, equally immutably limited?
He ought to ask Henry Louis Gates that one, some time.
Two, if a bunch of Okies are willing to vote for J.C. Watts and a lot of other Republicans would be happy to see Tom Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Condi Rice on a national ticket, then why isn't Carter overdue for a reappraisal of his old opinion about his fellow southern whites? Or is somebody's egotism and pride a little bit in the way? Has Carter been patting himself on the back all these years for not being a dumb hick racist, perhaps? Like Slick Willie, the smartest boy in class like Carter before him?
Maybe what we have here is a couple of boys who have been wearing their arms out patting themselves on the back at the expense of their neighbors for so long, they've neglected to reappraise often enough to keep from embarrassing themselves on a national stage.