How much has attitude changed?

The ugliness of it was casual, and that made it even uglier.
Growing up in Jay County in the middle of the last century, my generation was awash in casual racism. It was something we inherited from those who went before us, but by the 1960s it was also something we knew made no sense.
Stop by a coffee shop in, say, 1963 and you were almost certain to hear “the N word,” casually. No big deal.
Ours was a generation that found bigotry infested our childhood games. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about a game of tag; and I’m still bothered by the fact that part of the ritual before each game involved the phrase, “Round as a moon, dark as a coon.”
Ours was a generation that routinely said, “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, catch a (Fill in the blank) by the toe” at recess time at elementary school. A few years later, some smarter parents were insisting on the word “tiger” in its place.
And yet, here we were in the white bread American Midwest, with no more than a handful of black families to encounter in our everyday lives.
What was your opportunity for interaction with an African-American when you were growing up in Portland in the 1960s? Her name was Wanda Watkins. She was a sweet and smart kid who lived on West Water Street, and I think her family attended the A.M.E. Church that once stood on East Water next to what is now Jay Community Center.
What was your opportunity for interaction with an African-American when you were growing up in Dunkirk during the same period? It might have been George Miller, a biracial kid who attended Dunkirk schools for a time while he was living with his grandmother. He later went on to a distinguished — and I mean distinguished — career as an astrophysicist.
But in those days, he was just a black kid with red hair and freckles.
Beyond school, there were a handful of A.M.E. families. Ruth Nelson and her sister, India Evans, did housekeeping for a number of families, including mine. And Ruth is a permanent part of my childhood memories. She was like an extra parent.
While there was no tension, while there was no overt bigotry, there remained this hard-to-explain undercurrent of disparagement.
Maybe some of it had to do with the division between rural and urban.
We, after all, were hayseeds. Despite the presence of a handful of families, most of us associated African-Americans with the big city.
But the real answer is that the Civil War wasn’t over.
The Union had won on the battlefield, but the Reconstruction Era and the first half of the 20th century belonged to the South. Jim Crow was alive and well. Every day’s papers brought news of civil rights workers being harassed or beaten or murdered.
And in a very real way, the South — the hateful principles that led the Confederacy to war — set the tone for small town Midwestern America in that era. Hollywood had glamorized it with “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind.” So small town Indiana was ripe territory for George Wallace and Lester Maddox and the vestiges of the Klan that still hung around.
That was then. This is now.
But how much has changed?
That seems a valid question in the wake of last week’s horrific church slayings in South Carolina.
Have we made any progress? Have we cast off the infestation of casual bigotry?
Or are we, when you peal back the niceties, not all that far from where we were a few generations back?
I’d like to hope that the Jay County of today is different from the Jay County of my youth. But I think all of us need to ask ourselves whether that is actually true.