re: #155 HappyWarrior

Had no idea about that. My father’s father died in 1979. Eight years before I was born. So I never knew Dad’s Dad but the story about him that sticks in my mind and this is why I don’t have patience for people wanting to just shrug off racism as the past or whatever is how adamant he was about a certain racial slur never to be used by his sons or daughters.

I was born in ‘66, and as I mentioned earlier, I entered school in 1972, the first year the elementary school I first attended was integrated. In the first years, I think our elementary schools tried to consciously deprogram us of the inherent racism of the system that surrounded us, but that message was not sufficiently reinforced at home.

By my teen years, I was seeing more overt displays of racist rhetoric and racist assumptions from my peers, suburban white kids who had never known legally enforced segregation. Some probably thought they were “being edgy” or otherwise transgressive. The majority probably just soaked up their older relatives’ racism like a sponge.

As I mentioned before, I grew up with my racist paternal grandparents practically whining everyday over the loss of Jim Crow. My mother’s family was much more liberal on race - I never heard an overtly racist statement out of them. Yet, my maternal grandfather - the one who was shot down over Germany and spent time in a POW camp - was a bus driver for a time during fifties and early sixties before he took over his family’s dairy operation and would’ve had to have enforced segregation on his bus routes.

Growing up, and as an adult, my liberalism on race and other issues has put me at odds with the surviving members of my father’s family, and quite a few of my classmates have grown up to become Trumpers, much to my annoyance.

I don’t like writing apologia for racist behavior, and I hope I’m not doing so, but I’m also a believer in context and getting as much of an understanding of a situation and its participants as possible before demanding action.