Yeah, it's such a depressing thing.

For a long time growing up I didn't even know what racism was. It existed and was there if you looked for it, but as a child it wasn't really taught to us, and if you don't experience something directly - and importantly don't have a brain that can easily understand the concept of hating other people based on silly random things like skin colour or where they're born - it can be easily overlooked entirely.

This works both ways though, when we were young we heard racist jokes and just thought of them as jokes. We thought the joke was for example making a little fun of the differences between people from different places, like their accents, in a light-hearted way that works both ways (like other people would make fun of our accents too, and its all done in a generally good natured way), but as we grew older and got a bit wiser we saw the differences between those "jokes" and the actual good natured sort of stuff.

When you can't conceive of that sort of hatred, you often can't see it even when it's presented in front of you wrapped up to look like something acceptable, I suppose.

Thinking further, on the one hand I'd say we weren't really taught very effectively at school what racism was until well into our teens, even though we were taught from the youngest ages to have a basic kindness and respect for everybody, etc etc. We were taught to be anti-racist basically, but weren't actually told that racists exist and what racism actually was.

I wonder if the lessons would have carried a little more understanding if we were shown the larger picture earlier.

Anyway, yeah. It sucks that people can't just ignore all the race/gender/etc stuff and just treat people the same.

We'd still find loads of reasons to hate each other :-P But it would based on our beliefs, actions and character, not stupid things like the colour of our skin or where we're from!