Surely those days are gone. Surely, they're not. At home and around the globe, we act out our tribal-ness with subtlety and violence. What colour? Which religion? Which gender?
The Bay of Plenty Times Weekend last November recounted stories from locals who say they've faced job discrimination and hate speech because of their ethnicity.
Are we born racist? An article on Dailymedical.com in 2012 quoted scientists who had performed brain scans. They concluded racism might be hardwired because areas that detect ethnicity and control emotion are closely connected.
Researchers said brain chemistry might predispose us to unconsciously make decisions based on another's race.
Maybe this explains why my then 5-year-old son, on a trip to Cape Town, asked, "Why are there so many brown people here?" That was 2010.
Just months ago, at ages when they should have known better, my children asked why they couldn't have a "regular" babysitter at home in Papamoa, rather than the young Japanese man I'd chosen for his qualifications and driver's licence.
My family and I have work to do on acceptance. I, too, make assumptions based on ethnicity, appearance, religion, economic status and many other labels in which I box fellow humans for rapid dissection and categorisation. Mea culpa.
I don't give a damn about political correctness. I'm not out to win votes. I want to be a kinder human.
And a more accurate one. A journalism mentor in the US told me about a decade ago that calling a crime suspect "black" was not only racist, but incorrect. Does black mean ebony? Cocoa? Beige?
I don't know if I'd trust myself to label someone's race based on a fleeting glance. I also refuse to ask a round-bellied woman if she's pregnant unless I can see a baby's head crowning.
It's one thing to read about projects such as the The Counted by the UK's Guardian showing black males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year.
It's quite another to witness attitudes underpinning a culture of fear and disrespect not only from acquaintances but also from people I love.
In a single week over Christmas, I heard statements such as, "We don't go to that mall anymore because it's too dark" and "I married a brown girl". Then, there was the notion that people from cold climates (ie, white folk) were more industrious and inventive than those from warm places, where an abundance of sunshine and warmth rendered them complacent, if not downright lazy.
I reminded this theorist of the insulated structures Eskimos build - igloos -using blocks of snow.
This kind of casual racism bothers me now more than ever. I blame my kids. I'm trying to teach them how to respect people who look different, speak different, are differently-abled or different in appearance. Principles we learned in kindy we abandon as adults if we feel safety or money is threatened by people with too much pigment.
The paradox is this: some of the same people who describe people or neighbourhoods as "too dark" have performed significant acts of kindness for their brown brothers and sisters. What I've heard repeatedly is "those people" are okay individually.
Maybe, as a start, we could stop defining fellow humans primarily by skin tone, regardless of whether they stand alone or in a crowd. Maybe we can just be ourselves.
And if we can't reject the racist ideas some of our elders have inked on to our psyches, can we at least talk about the person, rather than discuss pigments of our imagination?
The kids are listening.
*Learn about New Zealand's first anti-racism campaign here: www.thatsus.co.nz
Dawn Picken is from the US and has lived in New Zealand for six years. She has two children, aged 11 and nearly 13, and lives with her Scots-Kiwi husband, kids and a dog named Ally in Papamoa.
