A bit of background about who I am and where I came from. I am 68, and grew up in a small city in North Central Texas. My parents were both born Texans and all four grandparents were from the South. Three of them from the post Confederate South. All four were the children or grand children of people who fled The Clearances in Scotland and Wales.
To a considerable extent I was raised in a fairly racist segregated atmosphere (“fairly” being relative to many areas of the Deep South and South West, and not forgetting that the Chicago and Watts Riots and other smiler incidences occur in places like Chicago and Watts,). In other words I was imprinted as a child with racist attitudes and (in)appropriate vocabulary.
Just a bit more context. My mother’s father, put his Black yard man’s two children through college, at a time when he was going through bankruptcy himself. My parents, both teachers (my mother in junior and high school and my dad in college), helped many of my mother’s needier students to attend the local college using their connections to find jobs and scholarships, and personally funded an anonymous scholarship to put one young Black student through all four years of college.
By most of the standards I read from liberals and progressives, which I agree with, my parents would be considered racist, if the previous paragraph were not known about them.
So to my story.