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In reply to the discussion: On election night, when it still looked like Hillary was going to win, commentators said she must [View all]Dark n Stormy Knight
(9,760 posts)hold up to scrutiny. Many of them harmless, others, not so much. I'm sure my psyche is not pure, considering my upbringing involved at lot of contact with the super-racist relatives. I have two women though, I believe, to thank for putting me on the right track, away from that.
My mom, daughter of that GM I spoke of, remarkably, never used the N word, despite everyone else in her family thinking nothing of it. Which seems a small thing, I know, but was just one manifestation of her rejection of the insidious white supremacist beliefs of her family and community.
She says her awakening came as a child on long trips down to visit the Virginia relatives. Her family would get to take restroom breaks at plentiful, nice, uncrowded rest stops. She was confused and appalled though, when they passed one of the few places where blacks were allowed to use the restrooms and saw the families waiting in long lines at a not-so-nice rest stop.
The other was my dad's mom. Her parents, Polish immigrants, headed a typical Baltimore city family of the early 1900s, in which racism was just a fact of life. She, I think simply out of her natural compassion for fellow humans, didn't buy into it. She might have believed in some weird stuff, like copper bracelets to stop arthritis (I know some still believe) and burning your toast to make it less caloric (OK, infinitesimally, yes, but yuck, it's burnt!), but she just rejected the idea of whites as a superior race, over blacks, Jews, anyone. It just didn't make any sense to her.
Mom and grandma surely held vestiges of those beliefs learned subconsciously from their environments, but both rejected racism where they consciously perceived it. I guess that's the best they could do, and the best I can do, as well.
Nice chatting with you.