Definitely nothing anti-racist. I was brought up to read a lot, exposed to a lot of good history, good books, good authorship.
My dad was a history buff, still is, and so we watched Ken Burns' The Civil War together when it was on PBS, and I was exposed to pretty solid mainstream American history growing up. We lived in Massachusetts and we weren't exposed to Southern revisionism about the Civil War, it was always a war about slavery for us. My dad was always a good influence when it came to history for just about all of my adolescent and part of my adult life, but it's the history he's comfortable with -- David McCollough, James McPhereson, Robert Caro. Something that stands out to me, though, is that my dad had books in his bookshelf by authors that he would not associate with today... I only remember Gore Vidal being in the bookshelf because when I was ... 10 or 11 I used to create characters in videogames and I could never come up with names, so I'd give them names of authors in my dad's bookshelf because they were right behind where the TV was, and I remember naming one of my players in like NBA Live 97 "Gore Vidal," and my dad was watching me play one day and he was like "...... They have Gore Vidal in an NBA game.....?" As an adult it's just so laughably hilarious to think about that now.
My parents were both mainstream center North East (e.g., center-left nationally, but center or center-right regionally) when it came to issues of race, agreeing with mainstream issues around civil rights, but they weren't progressive on those issues, and key culture war talking points in the 80s and 90s like "Welfare queens" was something they were open to... but ... wouldn't have actively taught that to us growing up.
My mother was more nativist than my father, for sure. She's the type of Irish catholic who grew up in the city, moved to the suburbs in post-war 50s, and then lamented how the old neighborhoods were burned out, drugged up, crime, by the 70s and 80s, and while she never said it explicitly to us there was an undercurrent that the people who lived there -- Puerto Ricans largely -- were the cause of that. Like, "they don't care about the neighborhood, there's no fathers in the picture" racism. But this didn't come out from them until we were adults. If there were examples of racism that I would bring up, my mother would have been quick to make an equivalence to like, the struggle of Irish immigrants or Polish immigrants, or something.
I bring up the Gore VIdal point because my parents were far more exposed to a variety of opinion and perspective when I was growing up than they are now. Now, they're Fox News cultists. I still buy my dad books for his birthday and CHristmas and I think he reads them, but selectively. I bought him Jill Lepore's new history of America, These Truths, and he had heard of it probably from the NYT Book Review, and I'd assume he skipped over it ... He'd think of it more as an ideological argument against American exceptionalism, than a perspective that you have to wrestle with in order to understand American exceptionalism as a sociological phenomenon. Now both of my parents are racist. I think there was always an undercurrent of nascent racism to both of them, more so my mother than my father she had always been more nativist (which is frustrating because she's more religious than my father ... but that's another topic altogether, at least in how I perceive religion should inform her versus how it does), but that the last ~10 years of Fox and Republicanism and Conservatism has made that something that ... like ... they're supposed to be proud of, instead of something that they're supposed to be ashamed of. Case in point, 2018, we had a city council election in our city and my mother flippantly exclaimed at Thanksgiving, "Well... I only voted for white candidates," and the reaction around the table from my siblings and my aunt was like "mom, what the fuck is wrong with you," and she just said "Well I'm just saying I did, I didn't do it on purpose but that's just how I voted..." sort of defense. But, like, 10 or 20 years ago, that would have been abhorrent to say around our dinner table, like something you should be deeply ashamed of saying, and today, at age 70 with the Fox News Hate and White supremacist president on TV every time, it's like ... a sort of flippant pride for her to say that, and then she backs off coy like "it's just how it is."
So, anyway, this is a really long way of saying no, we were never exposed to anti-racist history or narrative growing up in the house. I would have been exposed to mainstream anti-racist history in school and encouraged to explore it was an adolescent at home, but the sort of anti-racism of Frederick Douglass, or the success stories of Arthur Ashe or the sort of white-washed interpretations of Mohammed Ali ("He stood up for what he believed in"; without actually going into detail) or Bill Russell ("Him and Bob Cousy were great teammates,"). THe closest thing to anti-racism for me would have been Roots or Uncle Tom's Cabin. I remember when the book about Malcom X came out in the early 90s, and my mother was sort of suspicious of it... A family friend had it at their house, and my mom thought it was like, a little too grown up for me, so she nudged me away from it as I was drawn into the cover. My parents were more intellectual then. We always had mainstream liberal taste-maker publications in our home, the New Yorker, the NYT, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, occasional issues of the Atlantic or the Nation, but also conservative publications like the National Review in our house... at least since I was a teenager. But now, my parents are anti-intellectuals, populists. It's a cult. They fell hook line and sinker for "the migrant invasion" narrative before 2018 election, they're very open to the idea that, like, black and brown people actually have an advantage over white people because, "my kids wouldn't have gotten into harvard, and if you're black you're getting a full boat," or something. No, ma, I didn't get into Harvard because I never once did my homework in high school and never studied for tests, and if I was a black kid I would have been kicked out of our school instead of having a guidance counselor take me under his wing and do his damnedest to get me into college. THat's privilege that I still got into college and I'm in the position I'm in today.
