We talk lovingly of grandparents who made racist comments because to judge them in the present daylight is a historical imprudence, and we are careful to talk this way only around insiders who feel the same pride and guilt and will not raise eyebrows because this is polite company. So it is all a little joke, this ‘self-deprecation’ that makes nostalgia for a past of greater inequality edible, merely something to be sentimental about when the modern world is so vulgar. But the joke will never exhaust…
