Yes, but...
Once you can smear someone with a label such as racist, homophobe, sexist or whatever then you can ignore whatever they are trying to tell you!
For instance, I recently told a female professor that I had signed up for a workday task because I had noticed it was all young women on the sheet, that they might also need 'some muscle.' (This was going to be hard, physical labor dismantling a wooden structure.)
Of course the prof told me, 'Women have muscles too!' when I tried to explain that of course they did but that men were simply stronger when it comes to lugging stuff around, when that is down to biology. I really wanted to ask her if I was supposed to arm-wrestle her to prove my point except for two things:
1. She would probably have me thrown out of class.
2. She might have beaten me!
There are some relatively safe and successful African airlines, such as Ethiopian and SAA, which test my proposition. For every one of those, though, there must be 100 outfits that make you want to run away screaming.
I think part of the problem is this ignorance of dull reality that so many ideologues foster. They have a shining vision of equality so that they overlook obvious inequality on so many different levels. Too, if you come across with the money or at least the promise of the money, Boeing or Airbus are going to be very, very eager to jump into bed with you and help you play 'Airline.' Just look at how it went, for a while at least, between Boeing and Arik when Arik was going to be such a good customer in setting up Nigeria's premier airline.
Not so long ago, when I was dissing this shining vision of Arik, many young Nigerians were lining up behind Arik and telling me and others like me that we were not at all correct in our assumptions. I cannot remember if I was called a 'racist' in so many words, but it was a pretty clear assumption on the part of some, so that none of what I wrote was taken as reasonable.
Now, of course, we have this rather sad thread about how Arik is just a typical deadbeat, Nigerian operation, probably a money-laundering scam from the start. No one is talking much about that but I assume it must be impacting the safety of their operation to be so strapped for cash that they cannot pay their wages.
Proof of something or other is that Arik is allowed to continue to operate, passing reviews and checks with no problems found despite news of such chaos in the machinery. Is it reasonable to assume that each and every safety-related item is being looked after despite pervasive tales of 'no money?' This is why a First World operator would have seen their AOC yanked long ago in such a situation.