I have tried to stay away from this thread, because it is such a quagmire.
Allow me to describe my own background, and take it as you will. We cannot entirely escape our formative years.
There are many people today (including both of my brothers and both of my sisters) who would scorn me as a "bleeding heart liberal" .....
No one is whiter than I - most of my male ancestors at the time were pure Anglo soldiers in the Revolutionary Army (I am George Washington's 8th cousin, 6 times removed) and many of them (not all - there were some Quakers from Penn's original group) were slave-owners and Indian-killers. During the Civil War the Federal sympathizers probably outnumbered the Confederate sympathizers, but not by much.
Since, the overwhelming majority of my ancestors were deeply Christian, hard right conservative politically, and I grew up in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. None of my family would have dreamed of voting for a Democratic candidate for political office, with the exception of a beloved aunt and uncle whose political views were looked at as some sort of aberration.
School integration happened in my city between the 7th and 8th grades for me, and I was there. That is an interesting story of its own. But "my" culture of friends and family were deeply prejudiced implicitly, if not quite so much explicitly. That was the world that I was born into, and grew up in. A middle-class white kid in a Southern city simply did not mingle with the black kids, at that time.
When I matured into adult intelligence, I found that I could not help but reject many of those attitudes. (This was shortly after the racial turmoil of the mid-1960s and the peak of the "hippie movement" while the Vietnam War was still raging.) Although I was a devoutly pious and puritanical child, I "lost my religion" along with many of the other social and political leanings of my ancestors when I became an adult. None of my (younger) siblings (whose world was surprisingly different from mine) followed this trajectory - they were all "normal" kids who became more "conservative" as they aged.
So, today, I see that there are excellent humans of all stripes, as there are idiots and @ssholes as well. Are the percentages greater or lesser from group to group? Perhaps. My concept of the Christian ideal and the American dream is one of tolerance and freedom. But, I must admit that I tend to scrutinize non-whites more closely, whether I know it or not. This is not something that I try to do or like about myself, but it is too deeply ingrained to avoid.
And, last, to negate some of the idealistic egalitarian attitudes above, I sometimes have to agree with my ex-cousin-in-law, a well-respected political scientist, who remarked: "One of the biggest problems with stereotypes is that every group seems to be doing its damndest to live up to them."
So, even after everything else is said and done, the inertia of prejudices and stereotypes is likely to remain as long as there is evidence to keep them in place. So, does that mean that I should stop acting like a middle-aged middle-class American white man? What is that? How do I do that? I try to be as fair and open-minded as I can, and that is all I can do. I am far from perfect, but I strive to not be evil.
