I'd venture to say if you, or worse, your young child, was on the receiving-end of 'the N. word' and various other examples, that you wouldn't consider it a matter of 'choosing to believe.'
Well, yeah, I did write that we do have racists in this country, but that fact alone does not make us a racist nation. If our government somehow violated the rights of a class of our society, then that would make us a racist nation. Just because someone calls me a n----r, does not make the nation a racist nation, however, if the government would pass a law stating that everyone would be receiving a stimulus check, except those of the Jewish religion, then that would indeed make this a racist nation.
I had an incident some years ago with a white man and a black man walking down the street in a small town that was probably 100% white. The white man yelled to the black man, who was across the street, "Hey n----r, get out of our town. The small borough did not have a police department, so the call went to the state police, which was me. After I took the man's complaint, I thought that perhaps, I had a hate crime or at the very least, a case of making a Terroristic Threat.
When I got back to the barracks and wrote up the complaint and handed it to my Sergeant, he read it over and told me that I had misapplied the law. I argued my case by stating that the black man was frightened that harm would come to him if he didn't leave the borough immediately, so he did. He was actually there to take pictures of a house that was going to be listed to sell. The Sgt. agreed and told me to send it onto the D.A.'s office.
A few days later, I received a call from the County D.A. telling me that I had misapplied the law, but again, I was able to make a case for the black man. I told him (the D.A.) that I was convinced that the black man was scared for his safety. His voice was quivering when he spoke to me and he was very nervous and sweating. The D.A., after interviewing the complainant agreed to take it to court. The judge, after listening to both sides, (this was a non jury trial), decided to toss the case. He cited some other precedents in the law books and ended by saying that had the man actually made a threat of violence, it would have been a different case. IOW, had the white man said, "Hey n----r, get out of our town or I'm going to blow you away. Then, I would have had a case. Actually, I would have had a Civil Rights Case. So, I was educated on that day, as we in the state police say.
So, I could not tell you with 100% accuracy that the whole little borough is racist because of one man's comment, but they do have at least one racist living among them. Does that make sense to you? I don't like to stigmatize a town because of just one person's stupidity. Same here in the U.S. Just because we have maybe a few million racists, we cannot call this a racist nation because the government does treat each person the same, although sometimes we disagree with that, or there are consequences. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to make black, white, yellow and red all equal under the law. Since that time, there have been a few more amendments added to it to make it stronger.
I remember a time in our history when a white man didn't have to sell his house to a black man. Under the Fair Housing Amendment of 1988 that's no longer a choice. Looking back, it's hard to believe that people were actually making those kinds of choices.
He was a kind man and not rascist and on reflection he may simply have disliked me dating at 16 years of age rather than the boy being Italian. Perhaps because I knew about grandfather being in Italy and some of the things that went on there, it was me that had jumped to that conclusion. Food for thought 
