John Hughes and Racism

So looking over the recent race!fail, the question of How could they? How could anyone? has been on my mind a great deal.  I started thinking about the casual racism that we are all exposed to every day and then about the casual racism that I grew up with and I thought about John Hughes.
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The conversation on this is still going on - amazonziti has added a second post because the first one got too long.  Please keep boosting the signal, :).

ETA: eumelia has written a wonderful post on this here.