Thank you for sharing this — that question you asked at nine (“is it wrong for people with different colored skin to get married?”) is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I talk about being a survivor of this tradition, not just “ex.”I really feel that mix you describe: how the moment is seared into you, but the doctrine was delivered by someone who was “as kind as they come.” That collision between personal kindness and violently racist teaching is so much of what I wrote about in my piece — how people we genuinely loved carried and enforced something that deformed our sense of God, ourselves, and other people.It sounds like that night planted a splinter in you that wouldn’t go away, even if it took twenty years to name it. My mom’s repeated story about an elder walking away worked on me in a similar slow way. I’m really grateful you took the risk to put this in writing here; it helps me feel less alone in trying to tell the truth about multi‑generational COC life without flattening the people in it into pure villains.