is generational and behavior is so embedded that denial is common...

I grew up with a racist mother(in Michigan), but whether she didn't accept or wouldn't admit it... she exhibited her racism until she died...


...it is found everywhere... I have traveled throughout the United States for work (past 10 years) and see it in every state

In my own family, it's a cousin I haven't seen since he was 3 or 4. Everybody else in the family thinks he's nuts.

I've often wondered if he knows about the cross that was burned on his grandparents' front lawn and if he thinks it was a good idea. I don't wonder enough to contact him.

I lived in the part of Boston where block busting hadn't worked. They moved black families in, the Irish refused to move out. It was a strangely wonderful part of town.

I still say the most intensely racist place I ever lived was Boston. There were equal rights and access to education and voting mandated by law. The discrimination was unofficial, like red lining by banks in majority black areas so no one could get mortgages and slumlords owned all the property; and landlords and real estate agents who enforced color lines in the parts of town where they existed. There was little social mixing when I first moved there in the late 60s, something that blew my mind completely. The city got a little better over the years. The burbs have remained about the same, or were in 90 when I left.

Luckily they are slowly dying out; but they managed to do a lot of damage before they were through. Not only were my parents vicious racists but they managed to indoctrinate my oldest brother well, too. They were also gun nuts and fundamentalist religious zealots: stereotypical angry yahoos who hated everybody who didn't look and think the way they did. But they went to church every Sunday so they could feel superior to the hated hordes who were on the way to hellfire and damnation.