to be fair to Nanker though (although I'm sure he can speak for himself!), I think he did say that he understands that all of that developed.
While I do understand what you mean about yesteryear's "innocence", there was active anti-racism at the time too; there were other options.
I agree. And I guess that today's anti-racism didn't come from nowhere - the seeds were sown a long way back.
But even in my lifetime, I've seen the situation change dramatically. I'm 49 - so not THAT old - and when I was a kid, a family moved in just over the road, from I think Barbados. It's probably some credit to my parents that the most unusual thing about them that I recall noticing was that their youngest was called "Junior", which I though was a very strange name to give someone!
But there were attitudes in the street that I'd now recognise as racist, even though back then I didn't know what that was, given that I only really noticed in passing that this family were even black in the first place. I can remember neighbours talking about "that kind" or "those people", even while they were happy to be good neighbours to the family as individuals: they weren't actively racist to them as individuals, in the sense that they were daubing signs on the door or lobbing bricks through the window, but their attitudes were distinctly racist (with hindsight) towards them as members of an ethnic group. And, I suspect, if someone had challenged them about those attitudes, they'd have felt quite offended because they would have thought they were being "nice" to the family.
I think that's what I mean by "innocence". Perhaps "naïvety" might have been a better word...but then I was naïve, too, just in a different way.
And I remember the telling-off I got when I casually used the word "paki", which I had presumably picked up in the playground as a descriptor for people of Indian origin - so it worked the other way around, too.
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