That rings true to me. I couldn't see it until I'd moved to Argentina for a few years, which is also very racist but in a way sufficiently different that I could see the absurdity of the US system of racism from the outside. Dangerous as this is, recognizing my own blindness to my own subconscious racism makes me totally disregard the opinions of people who have lived in the US all their lives on this matter, because I know that 95% of them are looking at the world through the same lens of subconscious prejudice I was, because they've never seen anything different.

Reading things like The Color Purple, Black Like Me, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my childhood didn't remove that blind spot; if anything, the contrast tempted me to think that racism was pretty much a solved problem in the US, except for a few reactionaries. It wasn't until years of living something fundamentally different that I could start to notice how absurd and pervasive it was.