Living in the North, my grandparents never discussed beating the shit out of civil rights protesters. Nor did they spout overtly racist things.
TBH when I hear someone say that about their parents (they didn’t say racist shit out loud) I take that to mean: they didn’t say that sort of stuff out loud.
I just think about that as a sort of Schrodinger’s Racism- there’s an unknown distribution of super-shitty racists out there in Yankeedom too, but they’re neither racist nor non-racist until they open their mouths about it in un-coded ways. That it’s more covert there than it is in other places doesn’t really tell us if it’s more or less prevalent, it could just be telling us that in Yankeedom the racists feel ever-so-slightly more inhibited about being out loud about it.
TBH when I hear someone say that about their parents (they didn’t say racist shit out loud) I take that to mean: they didn’t say that sort of stuff out loud.
I just think about that as a sort of Schrodinger’s Racism- there’s an unknown distribution of super-shitty racists out there in Yankeedom too, but they’re neither racist nor non-racist until they open their mouths about it in un-coded ways. That it’s more covert there than it is in other places doesn’t really tell us if it’s more or less prevalent, it could just be telling us that in Yankeedom the racists feel ever-so-slightly more inhibited about being out loud about it.