I am in your mother's generation.

Look...the stories she told you about coming up in this country as a black person are all too true. I experienced many of the same things in the supposedly more enlightened North (Indiana, Chicago).

But think about this:: The stories that my mother and father told us about their lives in 1920s, '30s, snd '40s in Arkansas and Louisiana, respectively. Yeah...that's why they eventually (after WWII) joined the "Great Migration" of black people out of the South to try to escape the terror. My father and three of his brothers actually hopped a freight train to escape a lynch mob in Homer, Louisiana. They'd refused to continue share-cropping for white plantation owners. That's how I ended up being born in Indiana.

On the CRT tip, please see my recent piece: https://hdyerjr.medium.com/why-is-chuck-todd-still-on-television-7cd05e51fa45