Exactly this… I’ve been called out before for saying that someone (who was french) “looked french”, with the implication that it was racist of me to imply that people from different countries typically have subtly different features.

Of course, you can’t always tell where someone is from based on how they look, act, or speak, but pretending that there aren’t certain phenotypes that are more common some places than others is just ignoring what we can observe. It’s not always easy to pinpoint exactly what it is, but people generally have an idea of what a “typical southern/western/eastern/northern european”, looks like (or any other area of the world for that matter), and often that intuition will be correct. This is not racism, it’s simply the fact that after seeing a bunch of people from some country or region, you build a pattern for what phenotypes are typical in that region. Racism is when you decide to assign more worth to some phenotype or ethnicity than another, which is a whole different thing.

Basically, recognising that people are in fact different is not racism. Determining someones worth or quality of character based on differences in phenotype is.