My gran would have been 100 this year. She was so racist but there was no telling her.
So was my late father, he was an extreme racist.
Attitudes are formed largely by experience. My dad's life experiences were formed fighting for his country, firstly on the North West Frontier, where local freedom fighters (or terrorists as he called them) would willingly give their lives for the chance of killing a British soldier, and later he fought against the Germans. It's hardly surprising that he formed the views he did.
Also, people of his generation didn't get the opportunity to travel (well, he did, but only in the service of his country). Racism is largely based on ignorance, and people who never saw people of difference races (other than through the sights of a rifle) and who had to justify killing them to themselves, needed to dehumanise the people they killed. And it follows that this results in racism.
Of course, it's all about ignorance, lack of experience and lack of travel. Go back even further and a lot of people never travelled outside outside their own county, and maybe they didn't even travel outside their own village - this again leads to feels of insularity and superiority, which is just another form of racism.
Of course, this is dying out now, on our own small island. But it's still very prevalent in some countries, especially in rural parts of the USA
Just heard about this on a debate on Radio Wales "Do people become more bigoted as they get older?".
