I may have told this story before on here. When I was teaching 8 yr olds, a lad arrived from South Africa into my class. I showed him to his seat, an empty place next to Ahmed. He scowled at the poor boy and said loudly, "I daon't seet nixt to BLECKS!" (That's how he pronounced it.) The whole class gasped in utter horror. I ushered him outside for a minute and tried to explain gently about UK being a bit different, and Ahmed was very nice, and could he possibly bring himself to accept him as a desk-mate? He was adamant, so I moved the class around a little and sat him beside another pupil. Later, after several weeks, he and Ahmed were quite friendly and hung around together as they were both sports-mad.

My point is that this bigotry and racism was engendered in the lad by his early life, and the adults around him. He had sadly absorbed and embraced it. I believe that all bigots have been influenced by others around them in the same way. It's conditioning, and thus very hard to budge. A man raised in a KKK family is not easily going to conquer his racism or even wish to. Bigotry is like chicken pox. One catches it!