In the West racism isn't as pervasive, or as blatant (except from small, marginal hate groups) as it once was. Once upon a time, in the horrible Neanderthal past, whites simply didn't associate with blacks, and often the reverse was true. Most of the time this had nothing to do with overt or conscious racial hatred, it was just something that people didn't do. For that matter, associating with people of any other ethnic group wasn't done; for example, my grandparents were all immigrants from Slovakia and I grew up in an urban Slovak parish, and when my aunt dated an Italian boy from an Italian church my grandparents hit the ceiling - and so did my aunt's boyfriend's parents. Things weren't - as today's unsubtle nonsense of the "racist" past tends to make them seem that they were - always due to racism, but to parochialism, and even due to neighborhood loyalties: in my 1950's youth you just didn't associate with people from the next street or block, though you did mix with them on the city's main streets in the shops that lined them.
In the Olden Days, that is, the mid-twentieth century - before pagers, cell phones, the internet, widespread car ownership and mass-affordable jet travel, suburban flight, and such - people were much more rooted and parochial, neighborhood-oriented, ethnically homogenous, and so on. We did have electricity and early B&W (three networks, if your nearest city had them!) television.
All that began to break down a lot after WWII, a time when GI's were compelled to live closely with all sorts of people not found in their childhood neighborhoods and towns; the GI's began to see, and to become more knowledgeable about and comfortable with, a world much larger and people more varied than those in their hometown urban blocks and rural towns.
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