I don’t think being interested in the (ancestors’) race of a co-worker is necessary racist. I worked with people with all kinds of cultural backgrounds and it might be just an interesting topic to talk about. If someone has family in Iran, Senegal or Indonesia that’s definitely more interesting to me than a conversation about weather or last night’s football game.
In the beginning of COVID I ran out of tea once and since then I got used to just drink warm water from the tap in most cases. 🚰