I think a perfect example of this is Boomers and Gen X. My mother was a Boomer. She was born in 1950. She has the memory of having lived under Jim Crow in the deep South. Of every day having to convince white people that Black people were worthy. She remembers sharecropping, picking cotton, dressing certain ways, and being treated and talked about in certain ways by white people.

As a Gen Xer, who grew up in the 70s, I do not have any memory of Jim Crow. No Gen Xers have direct memories of having lived under Jim Crow. We were all born in the aftermath of it. Mine was the first generation of Black children who grew up never knowing what it was like to experience my mother's particular form of racism.

My generation was the first generation of Black kids that knew for an absolute certainty that we were the equals of white people because we had never experienced or been born any other way. This was never a matter of debate. We never had to convince ourselves we were their equal. We were born knowing it.

When the last of the Boomers have passed on in ten to twenty years, they will be the last generation of people to actually remember having lived under such an incredibly oppressive social system in the US. White Boomers will be the last generation of white people who had been born believing that Black people were less than them.

I'm not saying racism will be gone, but that particular version of it, just like those that practiced it or believed it, will have passed out of all memory.