Growing up in Atlanta in the 70s, we'd go to the beach in the Florida panhandle and use a confederate flag raft and lay on a rebel flag towel. Several states in the south had the confederate flag as part of their state flag well into the 80s and 90s. Country music stations played "proud to be a rebel cause the south's gonna do it again" and "if the south woulda won we had it made." The Dukes of Hazzard ruled the ratings and I carried a lunch box with the "general lee" on it to elementary school. Women wore bikinis with the confederate flag on them. Grandparents talked about "heritage."
This is simply how the south was in the 70s. As a white kid, it never occurred to me that this was racist, mainly because I didn't think about it one way or the other. My use of the confederate flag towel when I was 9 didn't make me a racist, although the existence of the towel certainly speaks volumes about our racist society.
It takes some growing up, both as individuals and as a society, to get to where we are today, and it's a huge improvement. But anyone who says that you were a racist in 1978 if you went to a KA party is being unreasonable. Were we part of an institutionally racist society? Of course we were, and we still are. But that doesn't necessarily point to a personal level of racism. I just wanted to ride some waves and get dry. As time passed and as people spoke out about it, as a society we realized that there's more hate than heritage in that flag, and so we evolved to where we are today.
I'm not expecting to change anyone's mind about this, but I suspect there are a lot of white kids out there who grew up in the same environment and who aren't going to post on this thread, because they don't want to be labeled a racist like I'm going to be.