Re: adults pass it down to the children
The UK has been casually racist for decades if not centuries, so you are spot on there. Also you are spot on with the "us / not us" distinction that we naturally gravitate to, being the underlying cause of bigoted behaviour.
Looking back at my early behaviour as a child I would argue that we do pick this up young; I was, back then, what I would now consider a racist little shit. And it was not that I specifically decided that non-white people somehow had less value, it was that UK society at the time had this undercurrent of non-white people somehow having less value which I picked up on. My childhood era is one containing Jim Davidson's line of "Chalky" jokes, and where Robinsons marmalade still had the offensive icon on the label, and the artist who drew TinTin apparently used to work at Robinsons. Friends of mine still use racially charged terms for anatomy without even thinking about it because "that's what we've always called that". I'm not going to mention which part of anatomy, but I'm pretty sure any UK citizen over the age of 30 can work it out. And it is an inherently racist term, no matter that "nobody means anything bad by it" when they use it.
There will always be an "us and them" mentality as this is default brain behaviour, that we probably cannot eradicate. But we can work to stop the denigration and ostracising of "them" based purely on being "them" instead of "us". We can work to stop the use of slurs, we can work to stop the implicit messaging of "less worth" based on language and phrasing, all of which gives kids the opportunity to grow up without similar (unconscious?) bias getting baked in to their world view. I try to be less of a shit now, but it is worrying how easy it is to slip back in to 80s UK mindset and say something which is unacceptable now, and quite frankly should be unacceptable now.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
