Couple of Yikes comments in Steve Gillard's comment boxes on his post on code-racism:

Both of my parents are pretty nakedly racist, my father moreso than my mother.

My mother likes to say things like "well that was a nice neighborhood when the Jews lived there because they're all smart and know how to handle money but it went downhill when the blacks moved in".

My father's a bit more fascistic about it. He loves to tell this charming little parable about how "there are so many Chinamen that if you lined them up two by two and stood in front of them with a 50 caliber machine gun, you couldn't kill them all in your lifetime". It's so bad that you can try to explain it a million times and he simply can't understand why what he said is wrong.

Anyway, I went to a high-school in Northern New Jersey that was half-black and then I went to Rutgers, which is racially mixed and relatively liberal. So I grew up hearing the most outlandish racism at home and not hearing much of it in school. You didn't use racial epithets in my high-school or you'd get your ass kicked.

Anyway, until the Internet came along, I pretty much lived in a world where "nice people" just weren't open about hating people because of the color of their skin. My parents are middle-class and could technically be considered "nice people" and even they don't come out with their bigotry in public.

So I always sort of believed that as liberal as anybody seemed on the surface, there was always a racist ID bioling underneath.

That's where the Internet comes in. It just confirms my long held belief. Usenet, the Fucked Company Message boards, LGF, the trolls that came over here from Instapundit, it's all pretty naked and pretty open online.

You don't eliminate racism by driving it undergound. That's why so many nice liberals simply don't get the raction to 9/11 and why so many leftists (with their bizarre conspiracy theories) don't even get it.

We invaded Iraq out of raw, naked racism. End of story. Anybody who tells you differently, well, look for the clues. Just needle them a bit until they come out with it. Or just pretend you're on their side, that no "political correctness" influences your thought, let them know that you're just a couple of white Christians hanging out away from the Jews and the niggers and you'll be suprised at what they come out with.

Paging Nicholas Kristoff. Try going back to small town Oregon and taking my advice. See what you find.

Here's another:

Grew up in an Irish Catholic family---nothing like having your grandmother shouting the N word at the TV while watching Notre Dame play football.

And watching your white trash uncle who couldnt keep a job because he is a low life scum bag rail about his kids having to sit next to "them" at school, and how he lost his job to affirmative action even though there isn't anyone darker than him in his union.

What really disturbs me is the cousins who are cops in Cleveland, the poorest most racially segregated city in the US, lets just say they missed out on enlightenment.

My granmother was a neat old lady who had a big heart, and she was an unapologetic racist, blacks, arabs, jews, chinese, protestant it didn't matter she had nothing nice to say about any of them.

The absolute worst thing about any of this---I am the asshole for calling them on it.

Try explaining to your cousin Kevin who barely graduated high school that the black man isn't his problem the rich man is.

We need more of this stuff to come out.