Growing up in white-washed suburban bumfuck Upstate New York in the 80s and 90s, nobody ever uttered the word racism. Too heavy. Too raw. In our cul-de-sacs and cookie-cutter classrooms, the magic word was prejudice. Teachers, PTA moms, Sunday school preachers — they all used it. Prejudice was soft, polite. It made it sound like we were talking about not liking lima beans, not a country built on slavery.
On TV, it was the same script. Diff’rent Strokes, after-school specials — the moral was always, “Don’t be prejudiced.” Never, “Stop being racist.” Racism was reserved for cross-burnings and George Wallace blocking school doors. Prejudice was just a personal flaw, like biting your nails.
I had a seventh-grade teacher — big perm, linebacker shoulder pads, Reagan/Bush sticker on the Volvo — who said, “Racism is mostly in the South, but up here sometimes people are prejudiced.” And we all nodded along like little idiots, pretending not to hear kids dropping N-bombs and telling black jokes they heard from their parents in the locker room.
And yeah, I was guilty too. Not out of malice, but because we didn’t know any better — and the adults weren’t going to admit what was really going on. Racism cracked the Norman Rockwell frame. So they sanded it down to prejudice and fed it to us like medicine in applesauce.
On that diet, racism looked like a cartoon villain — a Klansman, a sheriff in a newsreel — never your neighbor, your uncle, your best friend’s dad, or even you. Prejudice sounded like something you could quit, like smoking. But racism? That was baked into the walls.
Saying prejudice made us feel civilized, enlightened, better than those “other” places where racism lived. Meanwhile, it was in our jokes, our schools, our dating choices, our parents’ side-eyes when a Black family moved in.
“Damn it, there goes the property value!”
We didn’t know better — not because it wasn’t there, but because nobody around us would name it. No one wanted to say it out loud. And when a culture won’t say the word, the kids growing up inside it won’t either.
Prejudice was manageable. Racism was radioactive. Nobody wanted to admit we were soaking in it, so they dressed it up with a Hallmark word to make it sound less like a disease and more like a bad mood.
So, fuck you 80’s boomers for being racist groomers. You had an opportunity to right a lot of things, but instead you wronged my entire generation…
—P
