I was thinking about what the one guy said about racist ideas that were learned in early childhood being difficult (he made it sound impossible) to shed later. Children don't just develop these things on their own. I don't even think most children notice right away.
When I was two, my nursery school teacher was trying to teach us acceptance of differences. I remembered everything she said for a long time, but I couldn't unnderstand what she was talking about. I was on board with her for deaf people. I was on the same page for what she referred to as retarded people. I knew some kids with those struggles, and recognized them as different already. But when she was describing white people, and making sure that wee knew that white was a misnomer, but that they were actually pink and brown, just like everyone else, I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn't know what a white person was. I didn't know what my own race and ethnicity were. for some reason, I didn't go home and ask either. It became one of those things I assumed would make sense some day, like all the adult jokes I overheard and laughed at when I did grow up. I'm not sure when it finally clicked. I know that at a certain age, I cried in my mother's arms because I found out I wasn't white, and understood that to mean I was ugly. My mother assured me that being non-white did not make one ugly, and that I wasn't ugly. She tried to find out where I'd gotten such a concept. Irrespective of my mother's intervention, I certainly didn't unlearn the idea that only whites and those as white as possible were attractive until high school. Of course now, I think very, very highly of my looks, and the happier I am with them, the more poositive feedback I seem to get.
For the record, I knew a lot of white people when I was two. I just didn't know they were white, or what something like that meant.
I remember a story told to me by the mother of a 4 year old I cared for as part of an internship.
On the trip home, the little girl kept stealing glances at a white woman across the aisle of the bus. She'd been taught not to stare. Eventually, she couldn't contain herself and she asked, "Excuse me, Miss. How come you're not brown like me?" The woman wasn't sure how to answer, and the mother was embarrassed.
I got the little girl to talk to me about it. She told me she felt bad for the woman. "Because. She has no brown at all!"
We were in the shared office space of a city council member, and a state senator. I'm sure she'd seen white people before. I wonder how many she saw before she noticed the difference. And how interesting that only a little over a decade later, she was celebrating her blackness and her brown skin, in contrast to my sorrow about discovering my own brown skin.