"Even non-bigots have unconscious racial bias" is a less dramatic but more precise and helpful statement.

This is a very interesting matter. In my youth, in an all-boys, all-white Catholic grammar school in the north of England, not only was it acceptable to denigrate "niggers" and "Pakis", it was actually de rigeur to do so. No question. It was also no question that you were a fervent Catholic. Dissent from these points of view was unknown.

These days, and for evermore, I'm one of them atheists. It took quite a long time to reach that state, and I do constantly ask myself whether I've really made it all the way. Well, I've decided that it's impossible to make it all the way. All that brainwashing that faith schools indulge in during your most impressionable years must count for something. The damned spot can probably never be totally outed. Even Richard Dawkins expresses doubt (would that all those billions of believers were so rational). But there is a bottom line, in that any doubt I ever harbour will always be matched by a kneejerk demand for evidence.

Similarly with our early-life racism (I say early-life rather than innate because I don't believe that anyone is ever born racist). The sheer unwisdom of my youth in so many regards would make me cringe were I to dwell (but that's life, innit). The unthinking racist remarks I probably made a hundred times are part of that. I do like to think that experience has made me know better. Teaching in multiracial secondary schools in East London for 13 years was quite a jolt. Then 12 years in a rural Devon school with a large assemblage of white racist farmers' kids was a even bigger jolt. Many of the attitudes I've come across I found revolting. But revolting can jar you out of your own "unconscious" racism and make you retune your antennae so that the unconscious is extirpated. I don't think I'm an unconscious racist any more, but I can't prove it, even to myself.