It depends on where you live. I was not raised in the South, but in the North. I didn’t feel racist, but I also didn’t understand why. The Buffalo area had physically driven migrating black Americans into an inner city, one that was shot up last year by a white supremacist. My brother taught for 11 years in the school a couple blocks away from where that shooting occurred. The school had no funding base because the whites-herded themselves into like minded, like-skinned towns where school funding was confined to home values in that town, disconnected economically from funding in the ‘ghettos’ that deprived that school next to the TOPs supermarket of money for teachers, teaching supplies, playgrounds or areas for outside gym classes. I had huge green areas for mine—a general area for soccer or la cross, a stadium and track, and all the equipment for these varied sports we tried out. I did not ‘feel’ racist, but that doesn’t mean I accidentally practiced and participated in a system of racism because it was white collar.
The blue collar town I was born in just took down the “Sundown town” in 2019 my brother told me. That sign represented over one hundred and twenty years to threats to blacks Americans not to settle in that town. Only 5 years ago in that town a black American man’s small apartment building was torched by an arsonist. Both the perpetrator and the victim were both volunteer firefighters who just were certified. The black firefighter was married to a white woman and had two small children. He moved there to be closer to the fires he wanted to put out, not knowing he would move on top of one in his own home. The perpetrators sprayed the N-word on his building. A group of white chanted the basic “Go home N-word”, in accordance with the Sundown sign that was meant to threaten. A counter protest formed in front of this black firefighter’s burned building fortunately, and he swore he would stay. It took the power of the internet to raise awareness and bring in local BLM-like activists from the area.