Vestiges remain of those of us and our descendants who believe that we earned what we have through a lot of hard work and sacrifice. And we did. We just tend to not see how rules were written to make it easier for us and easier for us to not see the invisible hands that smoothed our way, and to call that the hard work of our parents and grandparents. And to ignore that the rules were written to disadvantage those who did not have the good sense to be born with white skin. Or Asian, for the more modern among us.
To be extremely honest, what I think is changing things more and more quickly than anything else is when our kids and grandkids have children with people who do not have the same level of European ancestry as we do. It takes a lot more to look down on your grandchildren than it does to look down on that family who moved in around the corner.
Trump and his spawned followers: they are the dying gasp of white supremacy.
It's only too bad it won't be the end of tribal and ethnic supremacy everywhere. When my wife's mother visited us in Alabama she was truly shocked to see our kids playing with black children and us not caring. That may be part of the reason for resentment that still lingers when we damn yankees move in. But I can't really blame my MIL, she was dumb as an onion when it came to those things, just a product of her upbringing and her environment.
You're more forgiving than I was. My dad about blew a gasket when he saw who my kids were playing with on the playground--although we'd already gone enough rounds before I left home that he hid it as well as he could.
Came to find out after he died that he tried some of his most racist shit on my young adult kids--who knew, at the time that their grandfather was on a definite decline. He knew what he was doing--he didn't try that shit in front of me or my husband. And of course, it didn't work.
I don't think my dad was dumb. I think he grew up in rough circumstances that were not his fault, nor his parents' fault, to be very fair: they were all dealt very difficult hands. Dad left the farm worked a good white collar job for decades, giving us all more economic security than his father or brother ever had. Dad worked with people who were not white in this job and did so well, as far as I can tell. And between marriages, he lived next door to a very nice man, similarly between marriages, in what I refer to as divorced man's row and they were cordial enough. Dad even spoke well of him. I give him credit for never speaking in any ugly or disrespectful way to or about any person of color to their face or even behind their back--he could not bring himself to feel that amount of hate towards an actual person, particularly someone who was so obviously not very different than he was. I was even a little bit almost proud of him for a while, for having somewhat mended his ways.
Then, like I said, after he passed away, I heard some stories from my kids who were not up for going toe to toe with their dying grandfather and I don't blame them for that. They respected the position of grandpa and respected a lot about him. And decided to ignore the rest. Frankly, because that was a luxury they had, that we all had.
I admire and respect a lot about my father but his behavior with regards to persons who were not white is not one of them.