Accuse the writers of the Declaration of Independence and every Jim Crow law. That started the hearts and minds of merica being obsessed with race. It trickles down through the generations. My sister was 5 when the Civil rights law was passed. She's not retired yet so a lot of segregation-era racists are still alive, kicking, and running a lot of companies. It trickles down through the people they influence.
That's why I keep saying that we'll have to see the Boomer generation pass before a real breakthrough is visible. We Boomers were the last generation raised in racial apartheid. I was in middle school before I ever knew a white person by name--until then, I had never so much as been on the same playground as a white child, never in the same movie seating, never in the same swimming pool. White Boomers older than me were well into adulthood when integration began to bring them face to face with blacks on an equal footing.
We didn't even see blacks and whites together on television to any significant extent. There were no blacks in The Flintstones or The Jetsons. None in Bewitched. None in Bonanza. No blacks lived in Mayberry. Disney movies--nope. I was in high school before the first African-American appeared in children's television programming.
The "normalcy" of segregation is inculcated into our psyches. It's like a child made drug-addicted in the womb. We feel it even when we don't think it, and it takes deliberate will to fight it.
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