Maybe it was always really shitty in many ways that you didn't know, too. That's the bigger shock, I would imagine.

Many people became radicalized by billionaire propaganda to turn on their fellow neighbors.

Its just how its always been.

Felt like the racism had always been here, but after 9/11, a lot of "Christians" saw Muslims as an active threat to Christianity and by extension, the US. May have just been me growing old enough to be aware of the rhetoric, but I felt like there was a huge uptick in the "We are a Christian nation" arguments in the years after 9/11. There was a lot of hate crimes against anyone who even looked a little "middle eastern" and there were parodies of children's songs about bombing Muslims that I pretty much heard on a weekly basis for the better part of a decade. I think that time normalized racism in the 2000s, and made it clear that having those opinions wouldn't necessarily ostracize you anymore. Thow social media into the mix, and you have a self-generating fire of hateful rhetoric based solely on the hateful lies and hateful perceptions the algorithm feeds to you because hate drives engagement.

Just my 2 cents there.