I can completely agree with your analysis as being plausible and likely, but where I differ is with the phrase "and the club owners weren't being racist". "Weren't acting on their own overt prejudice", maybe. They were committing an act of institutionalized racism. I can't call that anything other than racist, and I think that using a definition of racism that includes the personal and immediate... well, that's the sort of thinking that ends in people declaring there really isn't that many problems caused by racism any more.

This kind of thing slides by because everybody involved can point to how they're really "not racist, but..." The only way to stop them is to make people realize it's still not acceptable, which I think means calling it what it is and labeling those involved as a bunch of "racist, but"s.