This is something I've wrestled with my whole life. When I was younger I would bristle at the blanket indictment of white people as my forbears travelled here from Europe in the 1800's. In fact, my maternal great-great grandfather Henry Splaine, travelled from Ireland (with his four brothers) in the late 1840's and almost immediately joined a Massachusetts cavalry unit and fought in the Civil War. My Polish forebears didn't arrive until the late 1870's or early 1880's. My family had nothing to do with slavery, I would think...
But then I think Henry Splaine was able to rise to a Colonelcy and, in fact, commanded the unit when it was mustered out after the war. That was not something that was possible for the Black soldiers who fought. He was able to go on to a relatively prospeous career. He surely faced some anti-Irish prejudice, but of a type and scope miniscule in comparison to white attitudes against Blacks and he was soon enough apparently well assimilated. My Polish forebears came speaking not a lick of English, but were able to settle in Connecticut and make lives for themselves without the fear of being lynched or run off.
On yet the other hand, I was listening to Chris Hayes' podcast a week or so ago, when Ta-Nehisi Coates was the guest. Coates made the point that
in 1850 Black people were socially, economically and culturally completely dominated and their emancipation depended, in large part, on sympathetic whites. I think he said something like, 'If ALL white people agreed with slavery, we'd still have slavery. It wouldn't even be a question." And he's right: The Klan was (is?) a minoritarian organization dedicated to terrorizing anybody, black or white, sympathetic to oppressed persons. But, too, once emancipation was achieved, most, if not all, whites wanted to think the problem had been solved and they could go about their business. And many whites of my parents generation and before, felt that if Blacks were, in principle, equal to whites they still didn't want to live next door to them.
I think most of the problem, and certainly its duration, stems not from outright racism but the inconsistency and inconstant attittudes of whites...
