Don't blame author Truman Capote for the racist flaw made from his short 1957 novel   Breakfast at Tiffany's. In the book, the upstairs neighbor, Mr. Yunioshi, is a California-born photographer of Japanese descent, an adventurer who travels to remote parts of the world. His part in the novel is small, mainly because he is away travelling most of the time.  In the 1961 movie, Yunioshi has been emasculated into a shuffling, buck-toothed, broken-English-speaking buffoon with the personality of a dottering old woman, played by Irish American actor Mickey Rooney (barely recognizable) with thick glasses and fake buck teeth.   He is an object of comic "relief."
    I don't know why director Blake Edwards saw the need for an ethnic buffoon, when in 1961, shuffling Negro buffoons had already been pushed aside for dignified black actors like Sidney Poitier. (Edwards later said he regretted the decision to create the stereotyped Japanese character.) To his credit, Edwards includes some noticeable black people in the on-location New York street scenes, which was not a given in Hollywood motion pictures of the day.  So why be relatively progressive when including black people while degrading East Asian manhood?
    Don't get me wrong.  Aside from Mickey Rooney in yellowface, I like the   film   Breakfast at Tiffany's,  and  I felt guilty liking it because of the yellowface character.  So I checked the book out of the library and read it. 
 
To my pleasant surprise, Truman Capote's book was remarkably non-racist, written by a Southern Gay White man who was very aware that he (and other White people) actually shared the planet with myriad peoples of color.  His 1958 book includes frank discussions of lesbianism and interracial sex that would hardly have passed Hollywood censors (in movies or TV) until the late 1970s. The heroine, Holly Golightly, is a former runaway child bride** from rural Texas who has remade herself into a French-speaking urban sophisticate. She is a  mixture of the racist and the racially curious, reflecting both her small town origins and growing worldliness. 
     At one point she dismisses the first-person narrarator's short stories as rubbish about "brats and n***ers." At another she describes her delight at the well-dressed "colored children" who accompany their mothers to visit incarcerated relatives. Later still, she considers marriage to a rich Brazilian who she says has a touch of  le negre, and that is would be nice to have a "coony baby with bright green beautiful eyes."  She reports flirting under the table with a Cuban of Chinese and African descent. There is a rumor that she has shacked up for a few weeks with an African wood-carver deep in the bush.  Of course, none of Holly's racial statements, positive or negative, make it into the movie.  (In the book, Holly also maintains an avid interest in horses while in New York, relecting her rural roots.)

    Audrey Hepburn, who played Holly Golightly in the movie, in real life devoted her later years to famine relief, helping hungry chidlren in Africa.  Though she was descended from European nobility, she experienced hunger during World War 2.  Her casting in the movie    Gigi , was approved by Colette, the author of the book on which  Gigi was based, in the autobiographical part.  Colette, the French author, clearly states in her autobiography that she is of Haitian Creole descent. In the version of  Breakfast at Tiffany's, that I borrowed from the library, there were two short stories of Capote's also included. One of them,  House of Flowers, was set in Haiti.
    
    By the way, the novel,  Breakfast at Tiffany's  has a different ending than the movie. As much as I liked the movie, including its touching theme song   Moon River,  the different ending of the book makes more sense, and is more consistent with the character of Holly Golightly. 

**It is my sincere belief that Buddy Ebsen's portrayal of country veterinarian Dr. Golightly was part of the inspiration for his casting  in the  TV series    The Beverly Hillbillies.