Foxfyre, maybe your parents "soft racism" is the more realistic standpoint, while your generation has learnt to live in an airy-fairy ideological reality, affected by overall liberalization, Flower-Power, sexual emancipation, etc. But this might turn out to be largely a mirage. Many people today live in their head, in a liberal-minded theoretical and idealistic illusion. They don't listen to their heart anymore, which your parents did.
/Mats
How odd. My parents didn't listen to their hearts at all, they listened to their fear.
I listened to my heart, and my mother's FEAR led her to cut me off from the business they kept dragging me back to, saying it would be all mine someday. Her second husband, a nice southern racist, spent every PENNY of my fathers money, and now my mom struggles. Go figure.
Me? I'll always be alright.
For my parents I think it was more cultural. I didn't pick up on any fear. My mother hired a black woman to take care of me as a baby, for instance, and trusted her with me withut reservation. Neither one would ever intentionally be unkind or unfair to a black person or migrant Mexican worker for instance, nor did either think that minorities should be deprived of any privilege - EXCEPT - privilege to live WITH white folks. In their culture probably most white people, and also many black people, believed the races should not mix, should not intermarry yadda yadda. Separate but equal was the goal to achieve.
But I remember even as a very young child thinking how silly separate drinking fountains were or the black folks having to sit in the balcony and not down on the main floor of the theater where the white folks sat. I thought it dumb that black kids had to be bussed 20 miles away to the 'black' school in the neighboring city. But my parents had problems with none of that. And that mindset simply didn't take with my sister or myself.
So since we have corrected laws that allowed or promoted such silly discrimination, have removed all the legal inequities from the system, and have poured trillions into the effort to right former wrongs. . . . .
I am left with the only logical conclusion that we still have blatant racism because it is profitable to have racism.